Something eating the cherry tree!!!!

Can anyone help?>
went to look around our mini orchard yesterday - about 12-15 trees, mostly apples, 2 pears, an apricot a plum and a cherry - the cherry is I think a mixed morello/stellar from memory - but we rarely get fruit off it as they all get eaten first!!
Anyhow, yesterday I went to see if any fruit had set, and yes, there are quite a few, more than usual in fact. But then I realised that on some branches - not all, and not every leaf cluster on each branch - the leaves have been eaten down to very short stubs, every leaf within a cluster, such that half the tree has been denuded of leaves and fruit
There were no obvious nibbling marks, so is this the birds?
I know bullfinches like the buds, and we do have bullfinches, but surely that's the flower buds, which are long gone, and doesn't explain the leaves going as well. We do also, unfortunately, have lots of wood pigeons, and I know they will strip cabbage plants down to a stub, and this looks just like the photos I've seen of that. My only reservation there is that it's not yet a huge tree, and I wouldn't have thought it would support wood pigeons for too long, and there's obviously been a lot of eating going on. Or is it something else, rats, squirrels, mice etc. And will they strip the rest of the tree, and how come they haven't touched the pears which are next to the cherry. or any of the apples
Anyone got any ideas????:(
Angela

 

Welcome to the forum, Bluebirdbank

I'm not sure what caused the damage to your cherry tree but I would always suspect pigeons first of eating young leaves unless I'd actually caught another creature/bird in the act. If it was the fruit alone, I'd suspect starlings and blackbirds.

Where I live, the pigeons are voracious and can reduce young growth to nothing in minutes. They also seem to be quite unpredictable, some years they have a go at my bedding plants like geraniums and other years, they leave them alone.

Can you protect the tree with netting?

 

Thanks Flinty - strangely, until last year it did have netting over it, which had been on so long the branches had grown through, but I ripped it off last year, losing a lot of the fruit in the process, as I felt it less problem to lose fruit than have little birds trapped in the netting!!
I didn't mind sacrificing the fruit, but to see wholesale stripping of the leaves is rather more than a few fruit - the wood pigeons are a bit of a menace, i sometimes don't feel safe outside, they swoop so low, but until the farmer out the back has another licensed cull I imagine they'll stick around
I do wonder why the should just go for the cherry, and none of the other fruit trees???

 

Couldn't be some kind of caterpillar could it?

 

Thanks pete, my first thought - but for the amount of damage done, it would have to be a huge caterpillar, or millions of them, and there's no sign of anything anywhere
What do you think about why only the cherry tree and not the other fruit?

 

Thats what lead me to caterpillar, as they tend to be specific to a particular plant.

But it was just a guess. So probably not.

Surely pigeons would eat all new growth on any kind of tree, although I'm not in a rural situation we do get wood pigeons, but they have never damaged my peach or apple trees.

Have you had a look after dark, with a torch, its amazing what comes out at night.

 

No ,tend not to go round there after dark, as it is very dark up here and I'm a bit of a wimp
The damage does look more as if it's been ripped, as opposed to nibbled,but who knows?
It's interesting that maybe 3 ft worth of leaves have gone on most of the branches, but the rest of the leaf clusters on those branches have been left alone, both above and below those that have been eaten - wouldn't insects/caterpillers come from the ground and start chomping when they cane to the first leaves upwards, and carry on along the branch, rather than leave the first few clumps and then start eating???
And it's not necessarily new leaves they're eating - these are fully formed quite large leaves - and I notice that where they've been eaten down to the base, new leaves are re- sprouting from within the clump

 

Pigeons, especially in rural areas, are very wary birds. Could there be something about the position of the cherry tree that makes it particularly accessible to the pigeons? Or maybe it gives them the quickest escape route?

Another thought, are the chomped up branches low enough for the damage to be caused by deer? They can reach up surprisingly high.

 

No particular difference in access,except that it's maybe the furthest away from the very high hedge - 15'+
And although we're rural,and we do have deer nearby,they've never been seen this way and couldn't get in