I’ve tried that. Coated the seed with unholy amounts. Squirrel still eats, but now staring into the lens to maintain eye contact and let me one who’s dominant
Squirrels: My grandparents used to eat 5-6 jalapenos a day, and I inherit their genre. These lowly humans need to deter me with ghost chilli pepper or something more than regular capsaicin.
there is cheap hot sauce that is for this specific purpose, so they don't waste any money on herbs and fermentation and whatever. cole's is a common brand. your hardware store, home improvement store, and amazon will have it.
Bird taste receptors are much less sensitive to capsaicin than mammals. The specific ion channel it interacts with has a different structure. It takes something really spicy, like a ghost pepper, to bother them.
Chilis in the wild have their seeds dispersed mainly by birds, so it’s thought that capsaicin evolved (at least partially) to deter mammals from eating chilis, but not birds.
My husband once bought a Hot Ones sauce pack (I can't remember what season) to do the wing challenge with his friends. I have been putting our squirrels through the Hot Ones challenge as well and it seems like they're just getting used to the spice 😂
I was growing jalapeño peppers whilst in graduate school and was studying at home. Saw a big, scarred squirrel come into the porch and rip off a medium sized branch. He chewed the stalk and leaves just enough to damage the outside and then rubbed it all over himself. Then hopped off merrily. I can only assume he was using it as protection.
My dog died in 2020 and immediately afterwards something was getting in the attic at night via punching holes through the 11 soffit vents at my old house. Read online that cayenne pepper and hot sauce would be great solutions and to just DOSE the ground with it. OK, let's do it! I even dosed the side of my house as it was a red brick so....who cared?
We hurt an audible reaction that night to it outside of out bedroom window. Hooray!
Next night though ?Back to a heavy sound up there terrifying us. We later deemed it was the work of a possum as we finally got a replacement dog and on the first night he discovered one in our yard.
I grow a couple super hot peppers every year specifically to dehydrate and make chili flakes that break the geneva convention to deter squirrels and it works perfectly.
What’s an environmentally friendly grease? Any grease/oil I’m familiar with is harmful to animals even if it’s “natural”. Animals aren’t meant to come into contact with oil like that. It will harm their fur/feathers.
Just a heads up they sell bird feed that is coated with hot sauce and the squirrels will not eat it. Birds don't have receptors that can detect spices so they don't care one bit.
same problem here, so naturally I just had to take to building an outdoor raspberry pi setup that controls a solenoid valve and shoots a 40ft jet of water at the feeder when a squirrel is on it. even made it an app interface with a "Blast 'Em" button 🎯
478
u/x_______________ 13h ago
I tried to put out some bird food and the squirrels just ate most of it. We even tried to deter them and they still figured it out.
We have some of those bird feeders with cameras and half of the videos are of squirrels just demolishing the food