Pesky Squirrels

Hi

I tried to put up a 4-second video but the prompt said “file too big” so I put in a screenshot picture.

I have squirrels in my garden, as nice as they look and pleased as I am to see wildlife I do get irritated when I go out into my garden in the morning and find a large amount of my bulbs turned out of my pots and around my garden, I have persevered all through the summer with replanting the bulbs but the squirrels just keep digging them out.

Is there any way of getting rid of these little varmints please without the use of land mines?

Trish

 

I found some bulbs dug out the other day and put it down to foxes.
I have recently seen one squirrel around in the gardens and wonder if it could be him.

 

I have squirrels, see them in the conifers and they also run along the path over the fence and into the scrub behind my garden. They have been known to take apples and pears, but they have never really disturbed bulbs. They also bury quite a few acorns, hazelnuts and peanuts.
Badgers and foxes will dig holes for chafer grubs and leather jackets.

 

We have a family of squirrels who continually dig and forage in our garden. They've recently dug up strawberry plants, and are coming up to the house while we are out and having a go at my potted blueberry bushes. Annoying little critters....

 

I have squirral pie sometimes but last year we had 70-80

 

I have so many of them that I thought of making a fur coat if I could catch them, just joking!

Apart from digging up my bulbs and ruining my small potted plants they run through the trees and take the birds' eggs, this can be seen in the picture I posted above. I did a Google and was surprised to find that they are classed as vermin, so does that mean I can shoot them?

Perhaps NigelJ has the answer, put out some apples and pears and they don't bother with bulbs!

They are so pretty but they do get a bit annoying sometimes.

 

They used to be a pain for me last years, taking apples (ok, I just had a few on my dwarf tree) and sunflower heads, drilling holes in the birdfeeder. Then they disappeared this summer, and just yesterday we saw one again in the garden. Wondering if foxes could hunt them, or they were poisoned by council...

 

I've got lots of fallen apples and have noticed something was having a chew at them and it didn't look like birds, the grapes are showing signs as well.
I've only seen one around here and it's the first year I've ever seen any around here.

 

The answer is to get a weasel or a stoat or even a pine marten. I have just watched 5 of the tree rats messing around in our place. There are hundreds of them round here. The previous owner used to shoot them before the estate was built opposite. He reckoned he had got over 200 of them without making any inroads into the numbers of them.

 

I'm just wondering if this is the down side of growing or having native trees in your area.
Because, apart from apples, my trees are all exotic plants, and the neighbours mostly have ornamental trees, the squirrel population will struggle to survive.
We will wait and see how this lone one gets on, could be a youngster trying to find a territory.

 

I do the same as @JWK , I put wire on the top of my pots after seeding them so the plants grow through the mesh. Squirrels really can't do anything to mess with that.

I'd read all about sprinkling cayenne powder and other things that turned out to be ineffectual and a waste of money.

 

My dilemma is that I want to get rid of the squirrels but I don't want to harm them, perhaps the wire mesh method would be viable, but might look a bit unsightly and time consuming doing it that way.