I planted several fruit trees in an unmowed field full of tall "weeds." I thought I'd done a great thing making 6' tall cages for them to keep deer away while also keeping rabbits away. Imagine my surprise when one little tree got girdled over the winter, and others severely nibbled around the bases. Mice! I'd had no idea they ate the bark of young trees! So the next year, on went the plastic wrap-around protectors (which was not easy to do reaching through the cages which were buried about 6-8" into the ground...)
We also have squirrels, the smaller version of which are horribly destructive to anything remotely edible. We've relocated many, but we have to drive them a ways to get them to a place where they won't damage other people's properties. The larger, "normal" squirrels mainly eat the black walnuts that are all over the property.
I tried interplanting around the trees to create guilds, but the established "weeds" have mostly prevailed while my plantings struggled. If I had had more time to baby them they may have done better and survived to landrace... but I was a caregiver which took up much of my time. My garlic was the only thing that survived aside from the fruit trees, although the bulbs were small from that area. A volunteer grape vine planted itself at the base of one small apple tree, so I let it stay and I try to keep it pruned so it doesn't smother the tree. I added several baby nut trees to my food forest area, but none of them survived a full year.
We have moles and voles. I tried the mole-chaser windmill contraption from Lehman's, which worked for a few years until the bearings rusted out. And they (or something else) ate my saffron crocus bulbs each year before they could bloom anyway. If I try those again, I will put each bulb in a hardware cloth cage, or perhaps create a raised bed with hardware cloth under several inches of soil. But that too will eventually rust away leaving them unprotected. A feral cat ate some of our moles and mice, as well as some baby bunnies, but I haven't seen it this winter. I grew potatoes just fine though, so moles must not like potatoes. Sweet potato vines got decimated by grasshoppers within one 24 hour period, so no harvest from them at all.
I think what I most need to do is give more attention to my wanna-be food forest plantings during spring, summer and fall. Weeding was my most-neglected task; I did fairly well with watering. We do live downwind from a conventional farm field, so things tend to grow slow and small here, I'm guessing from the spray drift. Aside from planting downwind of a buffer of tall weeds, there isn't much I can do about that.
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