(upbeat music) - Some years ago, our children arrived on Christmas Eve ready to celebrate the holiday.

We had supper and happened to glance out into the yard to see a big deer eating out of the bird feeder.

Our grandson's eyes got as big as saucers as he was sure this was one of Santas reindeer, having a good supper before having to leave and help pull the sleigh to deliver presence.

That is still a highlight in the family.

But join me for the rest of the story on Prairie Yard and Garden - [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years, in the heart of Truck Country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmer's Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

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(upbeat music) - We often have deer visit our yard, even though we live right in town.

In the winter, we see lots of tracks in the snow and we had one doe that was an expert at tipping the bird feeder to spill the seeds so she could have a tasty meal.

We really don't mind sharing the bird seed, and quite often we will have a hosta that becomes a tasty meal to the deer.

However, when they started to pluck my tomatoes, it was time to get advice from John Loegering who deals with problem critters.

Welcome John.

- Thanks Mary, it's lovely to be here.

And I share your sentiment about tomatoes.

(both laughing) - Tell us about your background.

- Well, sure, I'm a wildlife ecologist, and have worked here at the University of Minnesota for about 20 years.

I grew up in the Red River Valley, and have enjoyed a lot of the things Red River Valley has to offer.

But then I pursued my education, I was in for a few years in Virginia at Virginia Tech and then at Oregon State for several years.

And my principal areas of research is actually forest birds at this point, but I've always, since my time at Oregon State, I've been doing some vertebrate pest control sort of work, and that's kind of how we've come to know each other.

- Well, that's what I was gonna ask.

How did you get started with being a kind of an expert in critters?

- Well, I'm a pretty broad ecologist, so I know a little bit about mammals, a little bit about birds.

You know, today most university faculty are pretty focused on one thing, whereas I'm a little bit different, and I focused on a lot of different things.

- Well, let's start with the little ones.

How about mice?

Are there different kinds of mice?

- There are a couple of species of mice.

They got just like Mickey, they got big ears, and a big long tail.

And these are just two examples of the same species.

There are a couple of species, they look like this.

So mice, they're climbers, they like to invade buildings, they also live outside in forest and pretty much anywhere, they live anywhere.

So this is a deer mice, white-footed mouse are common names for these creatures.

There are also house mice, and I only have, I have a terrible one, terrible sample of this, and it's not much, but you can see it's got big ears just like the other mice did.

House mice are commensal, they live with people.

And then we have something most folks call field mice, which aren't really mice, they're voles, starts with V, V-O-L-E. And voles, I brought two examples here, because one's kind of chubby, you know, that's what they get like when they're really old, and then the younger ones of course are a little thinner.

But voles, let's see like holds still, voles unlike mice have pretty small ears, they're barely longer than the fur, and a fairly short tail, maybe twice the size, twice the length of their feet.

And so voles are in usually grassy areas, more grassy areas and they tend not to be climbers.

So if you find a small rodent in your garage, it could be either a vole or a mouse, but if he's inside the house, he's almost always a mouse because he had to climb to get into the house.

For the most part, the mice eat about the same thing.

They just live in different environments.

You know, again, voles more of a grassland environment, mice more of a, well, almost anywhere but typically more forest.

- Which ones tend to chew the bark off of our tree.

- So almost any small rodent will chew the bark off the tree.

And typically that happens in winter time.

You know, most folks report this.

They mostly reported in March and April when they get out to see the damage.

But when it happens is usually during winter.

And if you were living in the middle of winter outside in Minnesota, pretty much anything that tasted good and had calories would look pretty darn fine.

So they're animals that don't climb, so it happens usually under the snow, or they use the snow kind of as a scaffold and they work their way up, and can chew essentially as high as the snow gets.

And of course, if it's a thin barked tree, all the better, because you don't have to chew your way through the protective layers, you can get to the cambium, you can get to the sap very readily, so maples, fruit trees, you know, all good examples of something that are vulnerable.

As well as some pine trees, things like arborvitae and such are highly vulnerable.

And that's not probably because the sap tastes good but because it has high calories, all the resins and such have burnable calories.

and that's what they're looking for, they're just looking to survive the winter.

- Is there anything that you can do to protect the trees from these little fellows in the winter?

- Yeah, that's really hard because damage often occurs at a time of year when we're not regularly going out and inspecting our landscapes.

So knowing that you have a vole population ahead of time would be handy to protect the tree itself, but the only thing you can do is apply some sort of a hardware cloth cylinder, something that's protective.

And the reason I say that, I mean, you can buy sprays to put on them, there are repellents.

And repellents have a variety of effectiveness.

If you really love that tree, I wouldn't use a repellent.

I'd go with the physical, I'd go with the encapsulating or, you know, putting a cylinder of hardware cloth around it with a small opening, because these critters, and now it's gonna get a little macabre, because again from the wildlife museum, I brought a skull and you can see how small that skull is.

You know, a dime is about all the diameter that it would need to slide through a welded wire, woven wire cloth, you know, or a hardware cloth.

So you have to have a pretty small grid size to protect that tree from voles.

If it's a rabbit, yeah, then any old grid size will do.

You could also be mindful of mulching your trees, right?

If you're a small mammal in Minnesota in February, you'd love to have the base of the thing you like to eat to have six inches of fresh mulch.

So that it's a great place to live, you've got all that insulation, you can burrow down in that and make a lovely home and be able to wait out those February storms.

So I always caution folks, if you have a vole problem or a debarking problem, look at your mulch as well, because you might wanna maybe hold off on a really thick mulch in the fall because that's just providing great habitat for at least for these guys, the voles.

We have three ground squirrels that are pretty typical in Minnesota.

The Richardson's, is on this side here, the Franklins in the middle, and then the 13-lined ground squirrel, or the stripey gopher that most people think of when the gophers.

These two do not have much of a concern for homeowners.

Most people don't have Richardson's or Franklins ground squirrels in their landscape, but the striped gopher or the 13-lined ground squirrel, he's everywhere and they're prolific, and they make lots of tunnels.

And if you're in the right environment, I hear lots of complaints about stripey gophers.

And I am prohibited from recommending anything but love for stripey gophers, because of course it is the University of Minnesota mascot.

(Mary laughing) So I can only tell you to love them and to be happy that you have our mascot living in your property.

(both laughing) We also have pocket gophers, right?

So all of the other gophers, the ground squirrels I should say, they make holes in the ground and they don't make much of a pile of dirt if you will.

But pocket gophers are the ones that most people when they think of a gopher and they think of that big mound, that five gallon bucket full of dirt that's dumped on the ground, and that's a pocket gopher.

And we have pretty much just one species of pocket gopher here in Minnesota.

And they're called pocket gophers because if you roll them over, you can see that right here, right next to their mouth they have little pockets in of skin, and that's a pocket where they put their groceries as they're foraging, and then they carry them down to their burrow, and carry them to the brood level or to the living chambers essentially.

And that pocket is so deep, it goes all the way back to the shoulder.

And that's how they sort of essentially carry the groceries back to their young and as well as put them in a place to store them for winter, the root crops are what pocket gophers love.

You know, carrots, certainly for potato, you know, their natural food out in a Prairie system would be those big thick roots from the forbs that are out in a Prairie system.

You know, grasses don't have a big thick taproot but the forbs do, and that's what they'd be targeting.

- If you have a problem with these guys, how do you catch them or how do you discourage them from tearing up your whole garden?

- I've always said it's a four step program for pest management here in Minnesota.

The first thing is, can you change what you're doing to discourage a critter to be there?

You know, if you can get them to just go someplace else, that solves your problem.

The second one is repel them in some way, use a repellent.

Exclude them is the third step, and then the fourth step of course is direct management.

You know, where you're capturing them, you're trapping them.

you're doing something like that.

With pocket gophers.

Most people don't want to change their landscape.

You know, a gardener who's got a beautiful well-manicured landscape, they're not interested in doing that.

They're not interested in planting things with those big tap roots, so that one is hard.

You can't really exclude these guys cause no one wants to bury a fence three or four feet down in the soil.

Repellents don't work, so it's about capturing them.

And so pocket gophers, probably the easiest way to deal with them is in a sort of lethal sort of way.

There aren't many live traps available for pocket gophers, they do exist but they're hard to deal with, so it's mostly kill trapping.

- [Mary] Now we're coming up into fall, and a lot of people want to plant tulips and bulb crops.

Do we have to worry about squirrels and maybe even gophers digging those up?

- Squirrels are a major, they love those fall tulips, you know, going into winter it's gonna be cold, they're looking for extra calories, and those tulip balls are big packages of energy.

You know, compared to anything else in the landscape, they're twice, they're not twice, they're 10 times more energy per package than anything else.

So, yeah, squirrels are notorious for digging up tulip bulbs.

And the solution is really hard.

There's no good solution Other than to perhaps lay a protective barrier, exclude them, chicken wire, just something to keep them from digging it up after you plant them.

The most vulnerable time is right after you plant them, because the squirrels, right, squirrel's natural behavior is to gather acorns, dig little hole, put the acorns in the hole and then come back and collect them when they're hungry.

So when you dig a tulip, you know, dig a hole for tulip, put a tulip in there, pack down some soil on top of it, you just mimicked what a squirrel naturally does.

So when they see that they think, "Hey look, a big squirrel just planted a nice little tidbit right there for me."

And they dig it out.

Squirrels in the bird feeders probably my number one requests.

The folks who have a bird feeders.

You know, Minnesotans, you know, somewhere in the 30 to 40% of Minnesotans feed birds, it's fantastic.

We are a bird loving state, but there are downsides.

And I don't know if this is a downside frankly, you know, my father loves the squirrels that come to his bird feeder.

In fact, when his bird feeders empty, he says the squirrels, I haven't verified this, but he says the squirrels come up to the window and put their hands over the window, looking in trying to remind him that he needs to fill the bird feeder.

So from my perspective or from the wildlife ecologist perspective, you know, think about bird seed, it's a huge package of food, more calories than you could ever get eating nuts and seeds and grass seeds, and you know, all the things that squirrels are normally eating.

So of course they're gonna think about how to get into the bird feeder.

In fact, they're thinking about it from the time they wake up until the time they go to bed every single day.

So if you're spending an hour a week trying to outwit a squirrel, you're gonna lose, the squirrel's gonna be smarter than you are.

Well, not really smarter, but more persistent.

And they're natural problem solvers.

So you have to outwit them by trickery.

So things you can do for squirrels.

Number one, if you have some extra cayenne pepper around, sprinkle it in with the seed.

It turns out cayenne pepper, mammals have receptors to taste it, birds do not.

So the birds won't care, and the squirrels, you know, that it might be a little too spicy for them.

Think about putting your bird feeder in a place that the squirrel can't access it.

So sometimes this involves either hanging it from a wire.

And if you can do that, two wires is better than one.

If you just hang it from one wire, then you get firemen squirrels, right?

They just crawl up on the tree or whatever, and they slide down and let down the pole, and they feast on the bird feeder.

But a squirrel can run in a wire just fine.

We've all seen them run the highline wires.

So look for an old hose, take a chunk old hose, three or four feet long, and then thread the wire that you hang the bird feeder through, just thread that hose, that old hose on the wire.

So the squirrel comes running along on that wire, he hits the hose section, and he, oops, flips on his back and falls off.

So simple, easy thing to do, cheap, inexpensive, and great entertainment.

You also can get cones that you can put on poles, and those are pretty good, but you'd be amazed at how far a squirrel can jump.

And they know exactly how far they can jump.

And sometimes they'll even figure out how to jump, you know, up onto the tree, and then run the high line wire and then over to the another tree, and finally figure out a way to jump to the Shepherd's crook where you have your bird feeder.

So they'll outwit you give them a chance.

And then there's also the option of just put maybe nail a cob of corn to the fence in the back of the yard, move them away from your bird feeder, give them an alternative problem to solve, and they'll spend all their time there and you'll get to enjoy the birds.

- Wow, that's a good idea.

Now how about rabbits?

- You know, rabbits are a wonderful component, I think, of our backyards, because there's so much fun to watch, but they are really the bane to many gardeners.

Rabbits are a little bit tough in the sense that they're general herbivore.

They run around.

So they, I have a rabbit skull here, and you can see they have two front incisors.

So one of the things we use to identify rabbit damage is the shoots that are nibbled off, or what have you are cleanly clips, just like you used your, you know, your best pruning shears, they just snipped it off, often at about a 45 degree angle.

So they'll snip off any vegetation and they'll eat just about anything, leafy greens, pretty much anything in your garden that you'd think about eating, rabbit would be just fine with that.

Trouble is you probably like the bottom part of the carrot, but the rabbits will have no trouble eating the top part, or the beans before it actually sets seed or many other things.

You know, a row of beans that just pops up, and have those two big cuddle leaves, they just run right down the row and nibble them all off.

So with rabbits, our management strategies are several fold.

You know, the first thing, is there anything I can do to change my habitat?

Well, try to make landscape less cluttered, right?

A rabbit is a very soft, yummy thing to eat.

So when it comes time to give birth, they look for a secure place.

Now in our landscapes, our manicured landscapes, sometimes that's an over mulched garden bed that maybe has shrubs that have low branches that provide that really secure place for rabbit to have babies.

So if you have those areas in your landscape, maybe think about tightening them up, cleaning them up, making less structure for a rabbit to hide in, and that makes your yard less hospitable, so the rabbits move elsewhere.

And then as far as managing the rabbits you have, repellent work pretty well on rabbits.

And there are a whole host of repellents that are based on olfactory or smell-based as well as taste-based to hot pepper sauce sorta based.

The key with repellents is, try one, buy the smallest bottle you can, try one, see if it works.

If it doesn't work, try another repellent.

Don't give up right away because some repellents work and some repellents don't for your particular circumstance, and not all repellents work in every single circumstance, so give it a try.

And then of course, if you have a garden, the beauty about rabbits is they hop but don't jump, a two foot fence is all you'd need to keep rabbits out of your garden, because they don't jump over things, they hop along.

So a simple two foot fence that you could easily step over keeps all the rabbits out.

(upbeat music) - I have a question, what would you recommend for a crab apple tree that looks good all summer?

- Well, that's a great question because everybody thinks of the flowering crab apples for the beautiful flowers in the spring, but they can last maybe a week or 10 days maximum, but the plants in your yard year round.

Plants standing next to a Donald Wyman crab at flowering crab, as is beautiful cherry red fruits that'll hang on all winter.

This is both a really beautiful winter landscape feature especially when a little snow is on the trees, adds color to the landscape, but that also would provide food for migrating flocks of cedar waxwings and pine grosbeaks during the winter time.

Then when the Robins come back in the spring, they'll usually clean up the rest of the fruit.

This tree is also disease resistant.

It gets a little bit of apple scab, but not nearly like some of the cultivars that lose all their leaves in mid summer.

And so it creates its most beautiful flowers, attractive foliage all summer, and then that beautiful fruit during the winter and early spring.

- [Announcer] Ask the Arboretum Experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, dedicated to enriching lives through the appreciation and knowledge of plants.

- John, what about deer in the yards?

- Deer in the yards are a real challenge.

They're not coming for the grass, they're coming for your hostas, right?

And other delicious horticultural products.

Certainly there are resistant varieties that you could plant, but let's face it, horticulturalists don't get into game just to limit their palette to a very narrow piece of the opportunities, right?

Of the possibilities.

So, you know, with deer you have to be a little more proactive and anticipate them coming.

First of all, deer damage is different from all the other critters we've been talking about, right?

All the other critters, rodents and rabbits and such, they have an incisor on the top and the bottom, so when they snip something off, it's like a nice garden sheers.

Deer, and I brought, sorry, I've got to go a little Halloween on you here, I've got a skull from a female deer, and you can see that she's got lower incisors, but there's nothing on the top.

She has no teeth on the top of her mouth.

So when a female deer or when any deer forages, they grab and rip, and that's how you can look, you can look at the damage, and notice that it looks like it's a torn damage on that twig or the hosta or what have you.

It doesn't look cleanly clipped, if it's cleanly clipped, you got a rabbit problem.

If it's torn, you got a deer problem.

So what to do.

There are lots of options for home sort of gardeners.

You certainly can exclude them, you can put up a fence, right?

And there are a lot of plans online that you can get that use electric fences or barrier fences.

If it's a small space, deer won't jump over a short fence to get into the garden, doesn't matter what's in there.

We've put, as biologist we've done some studies, and you can put apples and grain in the middle of winter in that area, and the deer won't jump in, because if they can't see a way to run and jump out, they won't jump in.

So short fence works for small spaces.

Now, as you get bigger and bigger spaces, you need a taller and taller fence.

So if you wanna protect three acres, you know, you're talking about a 10 foot fence.

But a small acre a small acreage, 20 by 20 feet, simple five foot fence will suffice.

They've done studies with 16 foot cattle panels.

So it was actually a 16 by 16 foot space, and they didn't have any deer that would go over the top.

If you wanna make it maybe longer, and then put a cattle panel every 16 feet or something, you know, something like that so that, and maybe put up some visual things to remind the deer that, "Hey, this there's a barrier."

Now that makes a little harder to garden admittedly, but it will keep the deer out, and it's, you know, a fairly short fence and it doesn't take a lot to set up, so that's a physical way.

You can also use electric fence.

If you have the ability to have or you purchased an electric fencer, there's a fun technique of taking a little peanut butter over a three by four inch square of aluminum foil, bend it over the wire, and then the scent attracts the deer, and then they get popped in the middle of the night with the electricity as they're sniffing the aluminum foil with the peanut butter.

So it tends to discourage them, and of course if they touch the fence, it'll zap them as well.

- How about repellents?

- There are some repellents that work with deer, and there are a whole host of sort of home remedies if you will, right?

The purpose of repellents are to make the deer think, "Well, this environment is something weird, it's something I'm not familiar with, it makes me uncomfortable, so I'm going to go over to the neighbors."

The trouble with repellents is, it depends on when you apply them, how much rain you've had?

The time since the last rain.

has the deer experience this repellent before?

So if your repellent that you're using is something that they've experienced before, they'll act like they don't have any trouble with it.

- Do you sometimes recommend alternating your repellent just so you don't get used to one?

- Absolutely, I mean, you always wanna mix up repellents, never buy the 55 gallon drum of the repellent, because that's too much, and they'll get used to it.

- Okay, well, let's just touch on a couple of other critters like a woodchuck and a skunk or a possum.

- So skunks are out there doing damage.

They often do this damage in August where they dig little blind little tunnels, and they're looking for lawn, grubs and insects, various insects in the turf.

And you might have a whole family of skunks, right?

So there's a lot of mouse, all running around together that are digging these holes.

They're out at night, most people just see the damage, they don't know what it is, probably skunks.

Hard to manage skunks.

You got to realize that skunks, they own the place.

They walk around in the middle of the night, they're packing the best weapon nature has, they're not afraid of anybody.

And they should only be afraid of one thing, and this is where I love to promote great horned owls, right?

Because a great horn owl is the only thing a skunk really really lives in fear of, because of course, owls are out at night, they're quiet, and they'd have no sense of smell.

So they don't care about the bazooka that that's the skunk is carrying to ward off any potential predators, they just swoop in and have them for a meal.

Woodchucks are tough, they're really just a big fat chubby squirrel, right there, related to squirrels, so they will climb trees, the funniest thing you'll ever see.

woodchucks usually the gardener thing is, is that when they're burrowing underneath your garden shed or your woodpile or what have you, they will cause landscape damage, they're tough to manage because there's not really a toxicant available, there's no repellents that really work.

Usually we manage them by excluding them from under the garden shed or the woodpile, or what have you.

And then occasionally this is one of the species where some of those gas cartridges actually are a lethal form of control.

Of course not near buildings that humans are habitating, but it's about the only thing I even mentioned, gas cartridges for.

- Well, in this pasture, we had an a possum by the greenhouse for the first time.

Are they good or bad?

- They're an omnivore, they eat anything and everything.

So for some gardeners, they might get in and disrupt their plants, but odds are they're probably eating insect, pests and things you don't want.

They're also fantastic for eating ticks, and is an odd connection, but possums are very fastidious, they like to keep themselves very clean, and they groom themselves very much.

So, you know, this is big shaggy dust mop that walks through the forest, or what have you, and it picks up every deer tick and wood tick in the environment, and then they clean themselves.

And so I can't remember, frankly, I can't remember what the estimates are, but thousands of ticks, they eat thousands of ticks, because they're always grooming and cleaning themselves off, and they're right at the right height to pick them all up.

So I would like to say possums are, okay, they're darn ugly, but, you know, their facing only their mother maybe could love, but I like to have more possums in the environment.

- John, this has been so interesting, and you have given us such wonderful information, thank you so much.

- It's really been my pleasure, thanks for coming.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of Truck Country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmer's Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center, and a beautiful Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you, who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

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