Rodent Prevention
Many rodents are good climbers, wire walkers and/or swimmers so it is hard to completely exclude them from your backyard fruit trees or palms. Here are some cultural techniques that will help you reduce damage.Proper spacing and pruning of trees & palms
Your palms and fruit trees should be trimmed so that they do not touch fences, overhead wires, or the branches of other trees. Rodents will run across fences, support poles, phone and cable TV wires, and tree branches to reach your palm or tree. They will also jump down into the canopy of palms and trees from higher accessible areas. Lower branches or palm leaves should not touch the ground or other areas where rodents can run. A low-hanging skirt of drooping palm leaves or branches give the rodents additional access routes and provides them with protective cover while feeding. Prune palms and trees so that the ground under them is open and visible. This sense of openness and lack of cover makes many rodents uncomfortable and more susceptible to predators.Rodent guards on the trunks will keep them from climbing trunks. Rodent guards can be as simple as a piece of sheet metal or aluminum 18-24 inches wide and as long as the circumference of the tree plus two inches. Punch holes along the sides of the sheet metal and lace the ends together with wire. If your tree has a short or forked trunk, then a sheet metal wall, 2 feet tall (60 cm), around the tree will reduce rodent access to it. If wires go through the crown of the tree or your tree touches a fence or branches of another tree, then rat guards might be useless--as in my story above.Trapping or poisoning rodents
My children would never allow me to trap or poison any living creature if it meant killing the animal. It's not like we're a bunch of tree huggers, just that we have always found other ways to deter rodent damage without actually killing the rodents (note - if I found rats in my attic you can discard the previous sentence). I have used "live traps" to capture animals, but then always have to think hard about where to release them (Gatorland comes to mind). One method that has worked well for us is to hire (adopt) a couple of neutered or spayed kittens from the Animal Adoption Center, then train them to stay in your back yard. One year (in California) we went from a harvest of 20-40 peaches to bushels and bushels thanks to a couple of good natured kittens who love to tease the animals eating the peaches (but never catching them, we keep the cats well fed).
