Thief!

I am sooooo mad! Squirrel thieves are taking all my Asian Pears! After frisky's comment on my last post about the tree I counted how many pieces of fruit we actually had and it was something like a couple of dozen. About a week ago I noticed that several leaves were lying around on the ground around the tree and found a half-eaten pear still attached to the branch. So annoying, but it was just one pear--at least I think so. At the time I didn't notice any other ones missing, but maybe I didn't look closely enough.

I decided to just watch and see what would happen since I wasn't sure what ate the pear so I wasn't sure how to prevent it. Then on Sunday, as we were running out the door, I noticed more leaves on the ground so I went closer to inspect. I had used red ribbon to tie up some of the branches to help support the weight of the fruit and I realized that one of the ribbons was looking really slack--because there was no fruit left on it!!! Something had plucked all the fruit clean off the branch! So then I counted how many pears I had left--eight. Eight out of twenty-four!

I talked to my neighbors today and they told me they saw a squirrel run off with a whole pear in it's mouth the other day so now I know what the little thief is. Last night I tied plastic bags around the remaining bunches of fruit to ward off the predators, until I could figure out a better solution. My mom told me to build a giant cage around the whole tree, but that'll look so ugly in the middle of my yard. So after some Internet research it looks like I'll have to get some sheet metal to wrap around the trunk so the squirrels can't climb up. That's tomorrow's project I guess. Oh, and in the meantime I lost another one sometime this afternoon/early evening so now we only have seven pears left :(

Here's a pic I took today so you could see how big the pears are now: