Nut Trees and Squirrels

L Greenslade wrote:I wonder if the squirrel behaviour is inate to all squirrels, as in would a UK squirrel put nuts into pots. Or is it maybe a learned habit?

Mine just bury them all over the garden and I end up with saplings everywhere. Or half nibble nuts on the ground.

So this is my solution:

So in essence, ripping off the saplings so there won't be so many squirrels and harvesting the nuts when half ripe? IMHO, squirrels are tree rats. Cute tree rats, but rats all the same: They are in the category of rodents and will bring the same diseases. This article points out the dangers of having squirrels as pets in the home, which is not your case, but a list of the diseases they can harbor is nevertheless important as touching a dead infected squirrel or your dog getting rabies from an infected specimen is still good to know. https://www.critterguard.org/blog/dangerous-diseases-from-squirrels-in-the-home
Here too, it is their habit to gnaw electrical wires in your car, lawnmower, snowblower, skid-steer... or pack nuts in the tailpipes of motorcycles as well as burying them in the lawn. When you have an infestation, they are not too particular as to where they hide the nuts and you cannot harvest a single healthy nut: They can harvest a whole area overnight. And the more there are of them, the earlier they go for the nuts, so harvesting them half ripe, you are still competing with that critter: Red, gray, black or albino does not seem to make a lot of difference [we have all kinds here]. The red may be the most destructive, though as they will gnaw through everything: Cushions of your lawnmower, stripping wires... it is an infestation, so your idea of limiting the number of saplings is quite good: You will force a new balance between your homestead, the squirrels and the nuts.
We can eat the gray squirrels. The red ones are too small and my husband shoots them and gives them as food to our chickens. We still can't harvest any of the wild nuts either though. The fact that they are often wormy [the nuts, not the squirrels ] limits our ability to get nuts even more.  
By totally isolating large trees [making it impossible for them to jump onto the tree from neighboring trees and nailing a smooth surface higher than they can jump up could work, [I have not tried as I do not yet have large nut trees, just strong saplings] but then, we would still have to deal with the worms infesting the nuts. Aarrgh!

I'm glad that some of you have employed the squirrels to harvest for you. Do either the nuts or the squirrels attract raccoons such that hazelnuts/filberts are a bad thing to plant in a chicken yard? I guess fruit trees would too, but maybe nuts more so?

Esther Platt wrote:I'm glad that some of you have employed the squirrels to harvest for you. Do either the nuts or the squirrels attract raccoons such that hazelnuts/filberts are a bad thing to plant in a chicken yard? I guess fruit trees would too, but maybe nuts more so?

Even our small American hazelnuts are too big for a chicken's gullet, so they would not eat the crop. Besides, there is that terrible husk that is so astringent.  Perhaps damage the bottom leaves?.
I have 2 orchards side by side, one that is used by my chickens and one that so far has not been. [future project but I don't have enough chickens for an effective patrol].
Because both orchards are fenced in, I have not had racoons, and indeed, the only way to keep your chickens *and your expensive supplementary feed for them* out of their reach is to first make the fence as tight as possible. Before I put up the chicken fence, I laid some 24" chicken wire flat on the ground; the vertical fence stands on top of it.The only nut trees that are surviving are the ones in the chicken yard. I still have to add American hazelnuts to it -filberts won't make it in zone 4b-.
Chickens are excellent at patrolling the orchard. They constantly scratch for pests. In the unpatrolled orchard, I have problems with serious rot, lichen, damage, pecking on the trunks of my apple trees. I'm not sure what is causing that and I may have to take some other action yet. [So far, I think that putting a sleeve around the trunk to protect from rabbits may be the cause, but I'm not sure].
In the chicken patrolled yard, I don't have a single tree that is damaged [but I never put a sleeve either] and thanks to the manure they are growing like gangbusters. These trees are a bit younger and I think I will have my first crop this year. With our sandy soil, we have numerous American hazelnut bushes in the forest outside but squirrels eat all the good ones and leave us with the wormy ones. I may have to do a shock treatment, like mowing all of the bushes to the ground for a year or two. [Hazelnut bushes can be coppiced and hazelnut worms hibernate in the soil and the moths come out in the spring to re-infect, year after year, so if chickens were to scratch the ground, they would eat a lot of these pests, I think.
Incidentally, racoons can be dissuaded with a strong pepper spray: they walk on their hands and feet, so when their "hands" get coated with a fiery hot spray, all the food they could eat becomes unpalatable. The only problem is renewing the pepper after each rain.

I know that one person mentioned eating the squirrels.  You have to be careful with that in North America as most of the squirrels carry parasites that are transmissible to humans during the warmer months.  Your best long term bet is to cultivate an alpha male.  He'll be big, greasy looking, super-stinky and nearly black with musk. (not to be confused with the actual black furred ones).  He will also serve the useful purpose of chasing off the hordes of smaller males.  You'll have to put up with females coming to visit twice a year during the normal mating periods but other than that, he'll chase any other squirrels away.  Then you only have to deal with one instead of dozens.