Never saw a quail here, but once I threw out a sack of peanuts that the birds refused to eat, and a few days later we had 25 female turkeys in our yard, and a morning two days later 32.
Some interesting observations: mourning doves lunge at bluejays, who then retreat, and a bluejay clings to...
Much less destruction by greed than kindness, Merle, if you ask me.
I do not feed deer; in fact, every time I see them (and that is fairly often), I open the door and make some strange noise. They stop, look at me, and then take off. And, have you noticed, there is always the "bait" ... the...
Merle, two comments: First, I believe many of the branches I see stripped in our back yard (the last week) and in the ravine behind our house were live. They will now die. Second, I will stop feeding the squirrels.
Hans L
I am just sitting here putting the titles of books I have in my bookcase and I care about into a database. So, I came to this Swedish book (I am Swedish by birth, now a US citizen), called "The Track Book" (Danish original: "Animal Tracks", and I flipped through it and suddenly saw a picture of...
Okay, looks like most of you believe squirrels. In lieu of any evidence to the contrary, I'll settle for squirrel. I'll also keep an eye out for more damage.
Thanks everyone for your input. Much appreciated. / Hans L
Here are the promised pictures. The best I can do, unfortunately. As I said, using binoculars, I could not make out bite marks, but the surface seems uneven (ridges). / Hans L
Hard to see any bark on the ground, as there are tons of leaves (and even if they fell before the bark, they are mixed in). Height: 35-40 feet. Branches not reachable from ravine sides.
Deer would not be able to reach this height (by far). The branches are at my eye level, but they grow from the bottom of the ravine, and and the damage is 35-40 feet up, and the branches cannot be reached from the sides of the ravine either.
I looked with binoculars, but was not able to uneqivically see teeth marks. Howerver, there are irregularieties. I am pretty sure, after having read all posts, that squirrels are to blame.
Very possible here Craneguy1. What surprises me is the evenness of the cuts at each end of the stripped parts. And I assume that the bark is not very nutritious, so it might be a desperate act (like millenia ago in the Nordic countries – and probably elsewhere – when people mixed bark into the...
Hello:
I live in the Cleveland, Ohio area, next to a ravine (relatively narrow and shallow branch of it). After the leaves fell off this fall (end of November), I noticed a number of oak branches having been partly stripped of their bark, with the bark edges totally even perpendicular to the...