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Produce => Pests & Diseases => Topic started by: Digeroo on July 09, 2015, 19:58:25
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Thought I had had every pest but now I have a mole.
And the voles are eating my broccoli. They have never done this before.
Do the mole repellents work. They do not have many stars on Amazon.
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The moles make tunnels which disturb plants, even unearth them, then the voles use these underground tunnels to lead them to the nicest potatoes, which they devour. I wish I had a remedy, both do so much damages. I sympathise :BangHead:
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When we first arrived here (a rural area in SW France), we had a big problem with moles. And clearly, looking at fields around, they are everywhere. We tried all the inexpensive products on the market, and also tried the various old local methods, none of which worked at all, or were too difficult so we quickly gave up.
There was one product the garden suppliers sold, which we rejected simply because it was too expensive - "Le détauper" (taupe being the French word for mole). I think it costs about £50. But we were assured it was the only method that really worked. We still refused to listen! Finally we were persuaded by an irishman (!) living locally that it worked, and we dug into our pockets. That was five years ago, and we have never had a problem since. It works, it works every time. From time to time we see a mole hill, and immediately take action. Success. How do we know? Well, be warned, it is an explosive, and I'm afraid to say it kills the mole.
The first box gives you enough for five. After that you just have to buy the replacement detonators, which are less expensiive.
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Not a hugely helpful response, but voles boom and bust on a four year cycle, so the next three years should be OK. Kestrels and kites love 'em, but you'd need a lot of kestrels and kites to really keep them down. Foxes also love them, but can make an almighty mess digging them out (guess how I know). You may have to resort to mousetraps...
Adrian
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Do not mention Kestrels because it gets me going about Red kites. We used to have Kestrals which perched on the bean poles and kept the voles under control. Now we have red kites and they simply eat birds no use catching voles. They nevfer touch the ground, just take birds from the trees.
I keep finding plants dieing and when I investigate there is a huge hole underneath. Grrrrr.
As anyone tried on of the electronic things.
Voles been booming here for years. I think I might try the hamster bucket/watering can trick with the voles. Will not cost anything. What is their favourite food? Perhaps some dried broad beans.
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Nipper rat traps with peanut bait, they are in no way protected, and be persistant. Cover the trap with a 3 litre plant pot. to prevent avian tragedies and check night and morning
Voles are 24/7 operators and do not scare easily. They will sit and watch where you plant your peas!
Moles do not like to know you are about and can be driven away(to your neighbours plot!) by vibrations and sounds of activity. I have found that inserting a bamboo cane in the molehill with an empty plastic bottle on top, to rattle with the wind ,seems to disturb them, so that no more molehills appear in that area but can be seen 30-40 yards away amongst the neighbours.... Do not tell them what you have done!
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We don't have red kites in Birmingham, but the kestrels almost disappeared a few years ago. I've no idea why, and they seem to be recovering again now. Their disappearance wasn't necessarily anything to do with the kites.
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We've had Kites here for a very long time (we're fairly close to the original re-introduced population) and if anything we have more kestrels around here now than we did back when kites were scarce ... so i wouldn't be too quick to jump to conclusions.
It's a really really bad year for voles on my plot ... it was fairly bad last year but they're getting worse. Hopefully they will bust next year leaving me with the chance of eating a few of my own strawberries!
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We don't have red kites in Birmingham, but the kestrels almost disappeared a few years ago. I've no idea why, and they seem to be recovering again now. Their disappearance wasn't necessarily anything to do with the kites.
Well, the Red Kites have got to here from where they were first released and artificially fed in the Chilterns. As they have made it to Northamptonshire (right at the border to Bedfordshire), it is only a matter of time before they will be spotted in the Birmingham area too, or at least in the rural areas around Brum.
I have never noticed the voles cycle, if would be nice to have one in four years off. It is tedious to plant all beans and peas with a cut off bottle on top or risk heavy losses, but at the moment 'needs must' and short beans that can't have a bottle are very prone to being bitten through by the blighters. Too bad.
:BangHead:
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Field voles have a population sycle over a few years as predator populations build up, then crash as vole numbers fall. As far as I know, bank voles don't follow the same pattern. Kites will undoubtedly reach Birmingham eventually, but they're taking their time about it. They must be pretty sedentary given the number I see on the last section of motorway going into London.
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They arrived here a couple of years ago and now there are very few other birds of prey. The kestrels and buzzards have gone.
I see the all the time now, but have never seen one on the ground. The road kill is the domain of the crows and magpies now.
I do not think they will take much longer to reach Birmingham. Saw one near Warwick a few weeks ago.
They are magnificent flyers but I still hate them with a vengeance. They were wiped out for a reason.
I suggest you do bird counts now. Then when the kites arrive you will have a record of what you loose.
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Hmmmmm ... well if people can just wipe out animals they take a dislike to we might as well start hunting foxes again ... and why not cull the badgers - it might work ... hedgehogs will be next on my list too - the prickly blighters - I never liked them!
:BangHead:
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They were reintroduced without proper analysis.
How many birds did you see today in your garden? Will you see the same number once the kites arrive?
I mole has now put a huge mole hill right in the middle of my climbling French beans.
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We've had Kites here since about 2005 and the decline in garden birds in our area has been in keeping with the national average ... it has a lot more to do with brainless people ripping out their garden and replacing them with the kind of horrible vulgar things you see on TV gardening shows and farmers reducing the amount of hedges to get better returns on their crops than it has to do with relatively few large birds of prey!
As I said - we're up on kestrels in the past few years from what I've seen and there are still plenty of buzzards and owls - and we've had lapwings and larks in the field behind our house for the first time in ages this year. The only bird that has been going down and down is the sparrow - and that's apparently due to the loss of habitat and some horrible bird virus. The majority of times I've seen kites with prey in their talons it's been small mammals, not birds.
If I see some scientific evidence that shows that they are definitely putting other bird species in danger then maybe I'll rethink my stance - but I haven't seen any.
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It would be a very poor evolutionary strategy for a native predator to hunt its prey down to such low numbers that the prey species were in trouble. Any predator that did that would soon die out itself as it ran out of food.
There's really only one species that drives others extinct - humans.
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Apparently lots of people get very upset and call the RSPB if they see a sparrowhawk in their garden. Understandably they don't want the precious songbirds that they feed and enjoy watching to get killed, and they think that the sprawks will decimate their songbird population.
But really, you'll only get sparrowhawks if you have plenty of songbirds in the first place, because hawks won't live in a place where there isn't enough sustainable food.
Things I think _are_ having a significant adverse effect on bird numbers: domestic cats, habitat loss, pesticides/herbicides/etc, egg collectors/vandals, changes in farming methods (like winter sowing grains, removing hedges, monoculture), introduction of non-native species, disease, climate change.
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This spring I was in a garden in Wales. Locally they have ravens (nesting about a hundred yards away, in fact), a goshawk, buzzards (one sat in a tree twenty yards away), and kites. Not forgetting sparrowhawks. Their garden was heaving with small birds - tits of all sorts, sparrows, woodpeckers, you name it. Every now and then a sparrowhawk would come stomping through, usually miss everything, and retire to sulk. Apparently it's been like that for years. The secret is that the small birds have enough cover that they are only a few yards away from a thick bush of some sort where the sparrowhawk will have great difficulty in chasing them down.
Similarly my out-law's garden is a jungle, heaving with small birds, I reckon it has most of Oxford's sparrows. Yes, the sparrowhawk visits, but it's hard for it to catch anything because there are so many obstacles. Give the small birds cover, and they can dodge the sprawks. You'll lose the odd one, but that's nature - (a) it's called mother for a reason and (b) what does most of nature eat? Other nature!
Meanwhile our allotment has reed bunting, linnet, starlings by the thousand, sparrows house and tree, resident kestrel, visiting sprawks. I've flushed a snipe off it in a wet winter, seen golden plover, swifts, swallows, martins house and sand, from it and yes, kites.
So no, it's not just the kites. I don't believe for one minute that you saw a kite take a kestrel (now a goshawk taking one, that would be a different matter), and won't ever believe it until I see it myself.
Adrian
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Kites are carrion feeders in the main; they take small ground prey as well, including insects and worms, but they're not agile enough in the air to take birds on any regular basis. They were almost exterminated because of a general prejudice against birds of prey which still exists on some shooting estates.
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I wish the kites would take all my voles though! :drunken_smilie:
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Around here it's magpies that destroy nests who have reduced the small bird population. The sparrowhawk gets a few fledglings but nothing like those taken by domestic cats. Will await arrival of kites. On the allotment, a young crow pair are protecting their single offspring by seeing off other birds in their airspace (I've seen them take on a sparrowhawk and a heron).
I know that a wilderness hides nests but the magpies are pretty persistent and they take birds the day they fledge if they can't get to the nest. The only chance is for a late nest to survive at the end of the magpie breeding season.
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Kites are carrion feeders in the main; they take small ground prey as well, including insects and worms, but they're not agile enough in the air to take birds on any regular basis.
The success of the Red Kite in the Chilterns is mainly due to the provision of regular "roadkill" along the M40 corridor. I understand that there are very few reports of kites taking live food as rodents or birds on the wing.
I did enjoy the view of a solitary bird doing low level passes over the restaurant debris left out for collection along Oxford Road, Reading.A magnificent sight of a large wingspan judging perfectly the gap between oncoming double decker buses and expertly executing stall turns, snatching scraps and soaring up above the early morning commutor traffic.
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I have not seem a kite take a kestrel. But since the red kites arrived they kestrals have disappeared.
I have never seen a red kite on the ground even on a road kill.
They pounce on birds in the tops of the trees.
When I first started my plot I was constantly surrounded by birds. Now I hardly see one. There was a wren about for sometime but that has gone too.
I hope that people in areas without the red kites will start keeping records of their small birds, so they have definitive records of what they loose in the future.
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If the kites have eaten all the small birds, then what are they eating now they've disappeared? In that situation, you'd expect predator numbers to crash and allow the prey to multiply again.
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There have been lots more immigrants round our way in recent times, and I've put on a bit of weight in the last few years. Does this mean that immigrants make me fatter? Maybe they're eating your kestrels too!
Does that sound ridiculous? Of course it does. Because 'thing A' happens at the same time as 'thing B' it doesn't prove that A causes B or vice versa no matter how likely you think it is.
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I think that kites have been getting a lot more "help" than other birds, what with them being pretty easy to reintroduce, and being a good poster child for conservation efforts. It's very obvious to see the effects of the work that's been done since there's a big difference between a handful of pairs in Wales and the much larger numbers we see now, so they tend to get prioritised. No one will notice if we have a thousand more sparrows, but a thousand more kites can't be overlooked, so that's where the money goes.
(It's a bit like how we'll donate money to save pandas or tigers but no one cares about all the insect species that go extinct.)
Many bird species are in decline whether there's kites in the area or not. So bird numbers are down for many reasons, but kites have been getting a big helping hand and sparrows and starlings haven't. It's easy to think that kites are the problem, but the problems with songbird numbers go much further back than the reintroduction of red kites.