As I mentioned in our Attracting Birds blog we have several mammals that live nearby and visit our backyard.  The largest is deer who roam in small groups throughout the neighborhood.  They were cute until they destroyed a hemlock that I had carried from my parent’s house as a very small sapling.  It had grown to about 8 feet tall and then the deer discovered it.  Had I known of their taste for hemlock I would have surrounded with a tall fence in the winter.  Now I am trying to nurse it back to life.  We have also seen them come to our bird feeding area and eat the birdseed that we have placed on the ground.  We usually try to chase them away because we are trying to feed the birds not them.  This year we have resorted to spraying the area with a liquid fence type product.  It smells terrible for about a day, but it seems to work.

We also have raccoons, opossums, squirrels, and chipmunks.  We don’t mind feeding the squirrels and chipmunks because they can be fun to watch, but our real problem is the raccoon who comes at night.   He shakes the squirrel proof hopper feeder and the squirrel proof tube feeder to empty all of seed out to snack on.   He used to knock them on the ground every night until we chained them to the wooden supports of an old treehouse.   The squirrels can’t get in those two feeders, but the raccoon just bullies them and shakes them until the seed is on the ground.  We now only put out as much as the birds can eat in a day so the raccoon finds them nearly empty which doesn’t seem to deter him.  Maybe that’s why he shakes them so hard.  He should try anger management.