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

[RT]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 01:08:29 -0400, Bill Christensen  
<billc_lists at greenbuilder.com> wrote:

> 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.

I saw my Englishman neighbour yesterday out on his tractor cutting the  
paths that he had created in an area under a group of elm trees where he  
had maintained a large patch of Buckthorn to be about knee-high so that  
the scene looked strikingly similar to the tea plantations in Assam India  
where he was born and grew up 80-some years ago.

My dog (who takes great delight in sneaking up behind hunters relaxing  
around campfires and placing his arctic wolf-like muzzle centimetres away  
 from the unsuspecting hunters' ear and scaring the bejeezuz out of them)  
and I snuck up and hid in a grove of junipers adjacent to the Tea  
Plantation and jumped out just as the Englishman rounded a corner to turn  
towards us, so that we achieved the desired result of getting his  
attention.

When he recovered from the "surprise" I told him that I had mentioned his  
"white fabric tag" technique of deterring deer and mentioned that a Texan  
(ie Wild Bill-bob Christensen) had sneered
that his (the Englishman's) technique "wouldn't work for more than a week".

I knew that the technique wad been successful for at least the past 5  
months since my having asked him about those white tags back in the early  
Spring so I asked him how long he had been having success with it prior.

"Five months ???!!" he exclaimed . " How about 10 years or maybe even 20  
years ? " he said while screwing up his face trying to remember.  "You  
know how 10 years at our age is likely many more ..." he continued,  
laughing.

I told him that I would take great pleasure in passing on this information  
to the sceptical Texan (not the exact phrase that I used but will  
adequately convey the gist, in polite company) after which we both had a  
good laugh as the conversation turned English-American history.
-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom  .  .  . T60BOM
Kanata, Ontario, Canada

A r c h i L o g i c  at  Y a h o o  dot C A
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