Charlie,

Crows are smart so they know not to mess with a man with a gun. Squirrels are not that smart. They will keep coming.

Last year, I got rid of 20+ squirrels all summer in to fall. Then next thing I know, new ones found this real estate (my orchard), moved in and invite friends. The battle continues.

I hope your wife is wrong.

Try the colored organza bags at myorgangabags.com to cover the fruit (or maybe it's yourorganzabags.com). Many sizes and working so far. I also hang CDs.

I hope you'll keep us posted on the results with the colored bags. Here's what I'm worried about: when I tried bags (not colored) or plastic mesh bags, or metal mesh bags, I would usually find the bag on the ground still attached to the (now) broken fruit spur/branch the fruit was growing from. In the non-metal bags the fruit was also gone. But the broken branch was the worse part because it takes at least a few years for it to grow back and produce fruit again.

What I'm trying now are metal bags (made from chicken/aviary wire) and stabilized by two or three metal posts. From points on the metal posts above the metal bag(s) I'm running wires to the metal bag. I have them tied tight enough so that a squirrel can grab on to the metal bag and pull or swing to his/her heart's content but the bag will not move enough to flex or break the branch. I tried it on an apple branch last year and it worked...but the squirrel pressure has been low recently so I'm not sure it was tested.

The only other thing I can think of is electric fencing around individual trees, and I'm hoping to set that up in the next month.

The wired metal bags is a lot of work, but if it's successful I'll just make larger bags and try to encircle a large enough part of a branch(or branches) to protect many fruit instead of just one or two. For metal posts I'm using 1/2" emt pipe from Home Depot...cheap and easy to knock into the ground. They're 10 ft long so I've been cutting them in half for use with low branches. On older trees with large branches I think you'd be able to tie the wire to other branches and the trunk ...unfortunately my trees are young so I have to use the posts.

I use several Safeguard traps baited with sunflower seeds. Squirrels can't
resist sunflower seeds. I trap an average of 40-50 per year. Then I shoot them with an air rifle or drown them. If you release them, they'll come back.

jbclem: I salute your efforts to get to eat your own fruit. Last year was my first to try bagging many clusters of orange/ripening persimmons with translucent tan grocery bags on maybe 2/3 of the fruit on 2 trees. Before the bagging, every day I saw new fruit damage from squirrels, wasps, woodpeckers, etc., but after the bags went up, the only subsequent damage was on the unbagged fruit. As the unbagged fruit got ripe, I harvested them first, thus leaving only the damaged, unbagged fruit for the critters to continue munching on. Which they did, but they never did 'crack the code' and start tearing up the bags to get to the fruit inside. Every fruit inside the bags was protected from every kind of critter here at that time. I am guessing that if coons or possums showed up that they could have easily overcome the bag barriers after smelling the contents. Gray translucent shopping bags from Lowe's were used on a lot of paw paw fruit to do the same job keeping out squirrels, which usually don't bother them too much, but this year did tear up several. After the bagging, no more squirrel damage occurred, and the bonus is that the ripe fruit just fell off the stems and had a safe landing inside the bags where ground critters could not start munching on them like they always do within a few hours of landing on the ground. If your trees were only being bothered by climbing rodents, and if they were far enough apart that squirrels could not jump on the branches from nearby "ladders", then leaving the lowest 4 ft. or so of trunk with no side branches would allow you to stand up a 3-1/2 ft. or so long section of galvanized, slit metal duct (sold at Lowe's), and they can be tied snug with a thin wire wrap at the bottom and top. Just like problematic parasite Mistletoe could be diminished by turning it into a kiss generator, maybe some of those goofy frauds always looking for some scam with which to take folks' $ away can come up with something useful this time that requires squirrels to get the magical benefits. Of course you have to throw in a few co-conspiring media types and cultural "stars" to do the attention getting, but they come pretty cheap anyway.

check with the law if it is legal to kill crows some places it is not and others give you a bounty
squirrels might be considered fur bearing animals and need a permit to kill
predator urination some times chases the away some time even human