You should have tried murder.
>>
>>Well, Spring is here, my S. oreophila had a pitcher up nearly 11 inches,
>>and everything has flower stalks coming up....and this morning I went out
>>and found the newly-developing S. oreophila pither broken off halfway, a
>>S. flava pitcher chewed into and broken over, and holes in the potting mix
>>in several pots. Little "Rocky" is at again. As the gray squirrel is an
>>introduced species in the Pacific Northwest (displacing our native one), I
>>think it's time to put out the rat traps......:\
Rat traps aren't a half bad idea, but make sure you
get big ones, and anchor them securely. My girlfriend
has been fighting the bushy tailed rodentia and has lost
several traps loaded with peanut butter to the little
buggers. They just walked off with them. One problem
may be that squirrels use their paws more, so it's harder
to kill them with the trap.
I'd be tempted to order a high quality pellet gun with
scope to snipe the buggers, if I didn't live in an apt.
However, my brain tells me that more of the buggers would
just move in. One person once suggested killing one of
the rodents, stuffing an ace of spades in its' mouth and
leaving it around for its' buddies to find, but I don't
think that will work either.
Where I, and Rick Walker, live, the problem is so pervasive
that we have all had to build cages over *all* our plants.
Rick built a greenhouse, and I built chicken wire or
hardware 'cloth' (square grid wire) cages for all my plants.
If it's any help, the hardware cloth seems to work well.
It comes in rolls, and I've made open ended cylinders of
the stuff, with sharp pokey points at the top end. I slide
these 1" tall tubes over tall growing plants like Sarrs,
which leaves them grow out the top, and the rodents don't
seem to like to crawl in over the spikey points down into
the cage (perhaps thinking, correctly, that if I ever caught
them stuck inside there I'd filet them and nail their hides
to the fence). I still have to anchor my cages to the pots,
but so far I've used this system and it's worked ok, except
for the occasional time they've tipped off the pots. Note
that the cage approach is preferable to just putting wire on
top of the soil surface around the growth crown, since the
pea-brained rodents either are smart enough to realize that
going over the top is likely to be painful, or they are
too stupid to realize that the wire doesn't go up to infinity.
I *HATE* the !^*##%*%!!!()@^$^ squirrels!!!
R.