My travails with wildlife eating my apple trees continues. I've beaten
off the gopher assault, now its the deer. My wife and I laboriously made
wire cages for each apple seedling and I put in two t-posts to hold each
in place. It worked well for the last three years but last week one
of the local deer learned how to stand on the wire to reach the leaves
past the top, and how to smash the cages in to get to more leaves on
the side. Then it used the same trick to eat half the leaves off all
my almond trees.
There's two young bucks hanging around plus a number of does and fawns.
We don't normally get bucks this time of year, they usually stay farther
up in the hills and only come down for the rut.
I'd like to discourage them from hanging around. Its not legal to shoot
guns in my county (I'm in a rural corner of the county that has most
of Silicon Valley in it), deer season isn't for another month or more
and I'm vegetarian in any case. So I'm looking for a way to let the
deer know that they're not welcome here besides killing and eating them.
I don't like dogs so that's not an option. Besides, I've seen the local
deer chase coyotes, unless it was a tough dog it might get its ass kicked.
What I need is a mountain lion to come down and eat some deer but its
sort of hard to just ring them up and tell them to come over for dinner...
oh, and I'm not a commercial orchard so I can't get a depredation permit.
Hence the paintball gun. My theory is that I can get close enough to them
to shoot them and give them some welts. I have no problem getting close
enough to throw rocks at them and I have a lousy throwing arm. I could
shoot them with my pellet rifle but I'd injure them and then I'd have
a bunch of gimpy deer around the place. Its probably illegal anyhow,
and I don't want to injure them I just want them to leave my trees alone.
So does anyone have any recommendations? Where do you get
CO2? Can you use compressed air instead? Whats the range?
Of course if there's a way to discourage them that involves fire
or explosives I'm all ears.
Thanks.
Eric the lunatic.
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