First of all, I hate to kill anything, but I dispatch red squirrels anytime I can with a high powered pellet gun and like someone else mentioned here the grays and chipmunks have taken over since. I had no problem with either until last winter when I found out that grays are not much better. I've had to replace the caps on multiple fuel cans because they are apparently still made using the soy based plastics thatcritters so like to chew on. But the real clincher is that over the winter the gray squirrels destroyed about half of the young red maples in my yard. I had assumed it was woodpeckers until I happened to see a red squirrel in late winter at the top of one of my trees happily stripping the bark, eating the sugar sweet cambium, and dropping the outer bark at the base of the trees ...they are occasional target practice now
Still killing anything is not my nature, and as an alternative I also spray fox or coyote urine around the base of anything valuble and my sheds. Rodent don't like it and will often move on, but if they don't the foxes and coyotes will enforce the ruling. Poisons? absolutely no way, I like my hawks and ground predators
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