If you keep tall grass down around your plantings, no piles of prunings or mulch or wood piles or things like that-to the extent that you can minimize the habitat for the small animals like the mice and the rabbits, you can go a long way towards solving some of those problems. There are very thorough extension publications on both deer and rabbits and another one on meadow voles that will provide detailed information on trapping and talks on repellants and where they're appropriate. We're going to talk about physical protection today. Well, the first step is identifying the culprit. This is done by deer.
Deer have no upper incisors so they make a rather messy cut.
Rabbits and rodents on the other hand, make a very sharp angle, about a forty-five degree angle, a very clean cut. Looks like it was done with pruning shears. And on this raspberry cane, that's very visible. Mice also do most of their damage right at ground zero, right at the base of the tree, in this case a stump from a Scotch Pine. You can see that they've completely taken all the bark off with their sharp little teeth.