[Greenbuilding] Discouraging White Tails (was Re: a wall (not a building) out of strawbales)

[Bill Christensen]

On 10/9/14, 5:30 PM, RT wrote:
>
> One of my neighbours, an English couple who are avid gardeners, seem 
> to have a great deal of success at discouraging deer by simply putting 
> up little pieces of white fabric, no bigger than a bow-tie, near 
> vegetation that they want to protect from deer.
>
> The explanation is that the deer (White Tails) see the white fabric as 
> an alarm signal and stay away.
We have pretty heavy deer pressure here, and I strongly suspect that the 
deer would not stay away more than a week using the white fabric method, 
if even that.

As Laren mentioned, deer tend to be more cautious about jumping into an 
area when they can't see where they're going to land.  They also get 
confused by having frequent, non-repeating variations in the height of a 
fence, as it's apparently harder for them to see how high it really is.  
So your best bet might be to do an opaque wall which will block the 
view, topped by a variable height fence of some sort.  We just run old 
discarded cable - about the size of a phone cable - in a haphazard 
pattern between 8' tall posts set 10' apart and they haven't bothered to 
get inside in 14 years.

Another idea which I really like but haven't yet implemented is to run a 
double fence. The outer one can be shorter and the space between the two 
can be used as a chicken run.  Again, the deer supposedly get confused 
because as they move past it the two fences change position relative to 
each other and they have trouble perceiving what's going on.  The added 
beauty here is that you get the benefit of having the chickens 
patrolling the perimeter of your garden for incoming bugs, without them 
tearing up your garden.

--
Bill Christensen
http://sustainablesources.com