What nonsense, I've been living with squirrels for 40 years. Two or three years is as long as they last. They can be irritating, if you leave plants at the foot of a tree, or you can just put a collar of chicken wire around the tree. I found a squirrel once in the chicken wire one day, struggling to move around, after he saw me, and did a double take, he took off, and I never saw a sign again that he had gone back to the chicken wire. Squirrels are cute. Squirrels are fun, and they were here first.
I looked up grey squirrels' lifespan in Wikipedia. I found "These squirrels can live to be 20 years old in captivity, but in the wild usually only live up to 12.5 years."
Depends on where, in West Virgina they're harvested for the stew pot at two years old. This monster will keep squirrels out:
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no matter which feeder, birds will knock lots of seed to the ground regardless, so I don't bother with the squirrel proof rube goldbergs with all their springs and levers that wear out... bird seed is plenty cheap enough... and masny birds prefer eating on teh ground; doves, cardinals, etc. And squirrels really don't eat a lot nor do they knock much seed to the ground, not compared to starlings, blue jays, and other birds, even tiny junkos and chickadees are very messy eaters. I just feed them all, an extra bag or two of seed a year won't put me in the poor house.
I have nearly a dozen lavender buhelias in my yard (they're easy to propagate from cuttings), and I can say that the deer around here seem to pay them no attention. The roses, I need to spray with a deterrent, which stinks to high heaven. The parcel to the west of us used to be leased to a commercial rose grower, and they finally moved.
Forsythia is safe too. However once one deer
Once the deer find the glop of peanut butter on the electric fence around the vegetable garden, well, they stay away from the vegetable garden after that.
Well, usually by the time they're eating them, the birds are dead. However, they do hunt and kill smaller bird species. They also harass hawks (I think that only works because of their greater numbers)
I can't say whether they do or not, but they do eat walnuts - they'll pick them up (yea, the big walnut shells), fly up and drop them onto roads and wait for cars to drive over them and then come down and eat the flesh. Terribly annoying when I lived in an area where someone had a productive walnut tree in their backyard, because the crows really didn't care if they dropped them ON the cars.
On the topic of avian diets - we've had great blue herons (birds you'd find in an estuary perhaps), fly into the yards around here and successfully hunt gophers. It's quite a sight, not only to see them stalk and kill, but down the whole thing down that pencil-thin neck.
Both Herons and Ravens are considered highly intelligent birds. One of the indicators of animal intelligence is their adaptability to different food sources when their preferred food source is scarce (too many species simply starve instead of finding something else to eat).
I know our barn owls don't hunt in the vicintity of their nesting box, but at the end of last season, there were a LOT of owl pellets (hocked up hair and bone) in the nesting box. They ate well. I hear the cricket-like chirping in there when I step out to the barn at night.
We have buzzards for that here. Eco-friendly way to get rid of dispatched possums. Used to leave out gophers and moles, now I feed the fresh gophers to our cat, and just leave out the moles (which the cat will have nothing to do with).
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You sound like you spend a lot on feeding the wildlife in your area. I buy food for only one type of animal: my chickens. They give me eggs in return. Everybody else finds enough around here or else they wouldn't live here.
Of course, you live in an area where you get snow & freeze, so year-round forage is probably more limited.
I spend hardly any time at all feeding critters... I'm not sustaining them, I'm only attracting them, mostly I'm entertaining myself and for a whole lot less money than people spend on show tickets, ball game tickets, and pretentious restos that serve lousy food. Most critters migrate to warmer climes when weather here becomes too harsh and what a lot of folks don't realize is that critters change their diet with the seasons. People who hunt all use the weak alibi that deer need to be culled or they'll starve, nothing can be further from the truth. With the first snowfall deer stop eating grass and eat woody plants instead. When the pinheads come across a dead deer they jump to the false conclusion that it died of starvation when in fact it died of disease, old age, and often from a wound inflicted by a cross eyed hunter... every spring I find shot deer in my back fields, many with an arrow still in them, I have a five gallon bucket chock full of hunter's arrows. And I can't tell you how many rotting deer I find minus their head. Hunting is not a sport, it's legalized murder.
Not saying you spend a lot of time on it - just seems like you're buying a quantity of different feeds. Hey, whatever entertains you.
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Uhm, dunno how we made a left turn into the politics of hunting, but IMO, doing it for _food_ is one thing (how's humanely dispatching a deer any worse than how a cow, sheep, etc meets its end to put food on your table). I'd never dream of hanging a dead animal part in my house, and it's unfortunate that people are clearly dispatching animals merely for trophies.
As for in your back fields - if they're YOUR fields, you aught to string up fencing and post no trespassing/hunting signs all over and start getting proactive about dealing with the trespassing.
Perhaps you could try to isolate where the access roads are that they're parking on, and start identifying vehicles and contacting the DFG or Sheriff.
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