Dealing With Varmints

Cindy had hoped that she would be able to learn some new strategies for dealing with ground squirrels from the expert on vertebrate pests the other day, but what it boiled down to was:  poison them.

That course of action is completely unacceptable to us; we simply could not do that to any animal, even one that eats our veggies and could undermine our hillside and potentially cause it to collapse into the canyon.  Squirrels dig burrows that can go very deep and can extend up to 150 feet, so the probability of damage to the hillside is very real.

When I was working on a military base in Northern California there were many ground squirrels all over the installation, busily digging into hillsides and under roads.  There was also a very beautiful fox who would run around our building every morning.  Then one day we found the fox dead outside the building, undoubtedly an unintended victim of poison put out for the squirrels.  The sad thing was that the fox would probably have taken out at least as many of the squirrels if it had been left to hunt them.

The state of California is becoming more aware of and intent on avoiding this sort of unintended consequence to other critters, such as foxes, coyotes and hawks, as well as domestic cats and dogs.  It does no good to poison the squirrels anyway; because they are social animals, more squirrels will simply move into the vacant burrow and the problem will start all over again.

So we'll keep on doing the best we can by excluding them from the vegetable beds with Cindy's varmint repelling panels and other fencing.