Ilene,

The active ingredients appear to be pet dander and mothballs.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Squirrel Chaser at Northern Tools & Equipment

Pet dander and mothballs......ewww! How bout putting a little corn out for him. Maybe he'd like that better than apples. Squirrels have to eat too. My resident squirrel got right in there with the bird's eating the corn in the hen scratch until he crossed the road once too often Saturday :( If I've told him once, I've told him a thousand times not to do that, but he didn't listen!). We had the burial Saturday evening :(

Barbara

For the first time in 13 years that I've lived here, squirrels have begun to come into my yard and bother the bird feeders. They also stripped all the apples from my trees. We live in the country on a 20 acre meadow, so these little guys have to cross open country to make it to my yard. We set a have-a-heart trap and have relocated 4 so far. They're beginning to really be a nuisance. My only dog is an indoor min doxie. We have also caught a coon in the trap. That was an adventure getting him out of that without one of us being injured. Might give that a try, we bait it with half of a ear of corn.
Cooper

I wish I could enjoy the cuteness of squirrels, but I just can't. They do so much damage. Shortly after we moved here, we found a nest in the eaves of our house. And they've been up in the attic at our rental house and chewed through the electrical wires. Don't know how they survived that, we didn't find any "remains" up there, just all of a sudden, didn't have any power in part of the house. One year they stripped all the peaches off one of my peach trees. I wouldn't so much mind feeding them, but they pick something, carry it off and bury it, and forget where they buried it. Then they go back for more and before you know it, they've robbed you of all your stuff. Testimony to that is how many black walnut trees come up in my raised beds every spring when the nearest tree is over 100' from our yard, and a cache of pecans that we found (too old to be any good by then) in between the braces of a floor we tore up over at the rental last year. I've seen squirrels sitting in the bird feeder eating all the sunflower seed and casting the rest out onto the ground.

We have one of those traps, and I did trap one a couple years ago. He was relocated. But I was never able to lure any others into the trap after that. There is a skunk that perfumes the air from time to time in our neighborhood and I have no idea what I would do if it got into the trap.

Pet dander and a mothball. Hmmmm. Dawn, didn't you say it was against the law to use mothballs for anything other than the intended way and that mothballs are a carcinogen? How can they market these without getting into trouble? I'd think rain would dissolve the mothball and contaminate the ground beneath. Not sure it would be safe to use.

I just looked this site over better that you linked, Dawn. They have a Havaheart Spray-Away Motion Sensor that is getting great reviews. Some of those reviews really made me chuckle -- especially the one from the person who lives near a pub and has trouble with drunk people using his trees for..... well, you know. I might look into getting a couple of these.

And the same thing can be bought at Amazon.com for $10 less with free shipping.

Ilene,

Yes, it is illegal to use a pesticide for an off-label purpose (though plenty of people do it.) I assume the federal agency that regulates pesticides hasn't received any complaints about mothballs being used "off-label" in the product you mentioned, so they haven't investigated and done anything about it. Or, perhaps whoever makes that product did get it licensed and registered. I don't know.....I'm a gardener, not a lawyer.

As far as those sprinklers that are motion-activated, I know some people who've had good results with them and the similar "Scarecrow" sprinkler, and some who haven't. When you turn on a sprinkler here (maybe because we're normally water-deprived), the wildlife (birds, squirrels, rabbits, turtles, etc.) and the chickens, guineas and dogs all flock to it to drink and bathe, so your results may vary.

Anything like that is often temporarily effective but loses its effectiveness once the critters are used to it. So, if I were going to try it, I'd buy one and use it for a while before I decided to invest in another one.

These motion-activated sprinklers have been around for many years, so I wonder how effective they really are. It seems like if they really worked as advertised, you'd see them at the top of every "how to keep deer out of my garden" page, for example, and you don't. And I am very cynical about on-line reviews because many of them are written by marketing people posing as 'regular people' hired by the companies who own the products. Some of those kinds of people come here to GW at times and try to steer us toward their products too, and I ignore them and their testimonials when they do that.

Dawn

Yeah, I've seen that, too, Dawn. I read through all the reviews on Amazon and some of them say that the product is poorly made and that sometimes one doesn't work right out of the box. And that makes me wonder if all the rave reviews are legit. I do have problems in my front yard with the neighbor's cats. I'm really sick of the "surprises" they leave in my flower bed, including the damage they do to newly planted things, and the smell. I have been shooting them with a soaker water gun, and this helps except for one really persistent one. I normally like cats but since I had to have Pearl put to sleep I just don't want to get attached to another. So maybe I'll buy one and set it up in the front yard.

BTW, hanging a red Christmas ornament seemed to help keep the birds out of my tomatoes. I haven't had any problems at all in my raised beds. I did find one tomato this morning that had a jagged hole in it, and that was in one of the plants that didn't have a Christmas ornament. I used those red apple ornaments, because that's what I had. Discovered they're not waterproof, they kind of dissolve after several rains, and drip red stuff on the ground beneath them.