Food for: small to medium sized carnivores
Features: small gnawing, digging rodents
This week we explore the darker side of the Squirrel Force - those sly, darting, gnawing pests that wreak havoc on your property, invade college campuses and chase the birds away from the feeder you've so lovingly set up. Insidious furry agents of the rodent world, they seem immune to everything except, possibly, Kryptonite. They sneer at your pest control efforts and laugh at your feeble gadgets.
Squirrels ... why aren't they on the FBI's Public Enemy list, anyway?
Squirrels might be one of the most successful species that live in urban environments, but their very success makes them a real nuiscance to deal with. They're supposed to be territorial beasties, but the pressures and successes of the urban lifestyle means they've learned to live together. Sometimes it seems, alas, that they live together better than humans do.
Unfortunately, squirrels seem to think its their duty to go forth and multiply (and multiply!) and colonize the rest of the world, including places where they're not ordinarily found. Once they've moved in, getting rid of them is a challenge.
For such a small beastie, they do a lot of damage. Tree squirrels (the Red squirrel in particular) can destroy trees by tearing and eating the bark or by ripping bark strips from branch ends in their search for seeds and fruits, while their cousins the ground squirrels can damage trees by burrowing around the roots. Ground squirrel burrows also pose hazards for machinery and people (and livestock, occasionally). Ground squirrel burrows have been known to cause foundation problems. To them, a house is just a big rock cliff with soft diggable ground around it.
So how DO you get rid of them?
There are all sorts of recommendations floating around on how to get rid of squirrels and they vary from the practical to the weird. None of them is completely successful, though many have their merits.
- Habitat modification - Clean up brush piles, fill in burrows and nesting sites in trees, trim back tree branches so that trees don't interlace. Move or remove bird feeders (or buy one with a good baffle on it), and make garbage cans harder to open. Lure them away from your yard (or to the edge of it) with a feeder. Cover chimneys, crawlspaces, and vents with hardware cloth or some other type of grill that
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