Wildlife Damage in Winter

While the attention this week will be on our friend Phil, the rest of his kin will still be hibernating well into the month of March. The groundhog is notorious for doing quite a bit of damage around the home landscape. Who hasn’t lost a tomato in its prime or noticed gnawed ornamentals in their yard? This time of year, in the dead of winter the groundhog is not to blame. A fair amount of landscape injury comes from 'A Tail of Two Critters'. The whitetail deer and the cottontail rabbit can do extensive damage in winter around your home.

Whitetail deer are selective and adaptive eaters. Their eating habits change with the seasons and availability of a food source. They may ignore a planting in summer but turn to it when nothing else is around to sustain them. Often deer will try plants for taste, so you may notice a plant ripped and left behind as it did not please the animal’s pallet. Signs of deer damage are jagged or torn stem ends, bark that seems to have been rubbed off and of course their droppings.

Cottontail rabbits are active all year round and can usually be seen dawn to dusk. As they need cover to protect themselves from predators, they are often seen around brush piles, field edges, and landscaped backyards. There they find suitable food as well. Rabbits can do a serve amount of damage in the winter when other food supplies have dwindled to the point of actually killing some trees and shrubs. Telltale signs are patches of gnawed bark within two and half feet of the ground. Distinctive to the rabbit is their clipping of stems which resembles a knife cut.

Exclusion is the first step to protect your landscape from damage. Most people like the bucolic scene of deer roaming in nature so fencing around individual plantings is usually the choice. Remember, deer are hungry and can reach over to eat so height is a consideration. For the cottontail, two to four foot of chicken wire tight to the ground is a hindrance. Wire-hardware cloth and tree guards will offer some protection to the trunks too.

Repellants have been shown to be successful in conjunction with other means of control. If you choose to use such a product, please follow the labeled directions. There are a lot variables to consider when using repellents as the animals’ eating habits change with availability. They are best used at the onset of visible damage.

Both rabbits and deer are protected and cannot be harmed outside of the established hunting times. Because of the prolific nature of the rabbit’s reproduction, trapping is generally not effective. For more information on controlling the damage these two tails can do, contact the Penn State Master Gardeners in Lackawanna County at 570-963-6842 or email LackawannaMG@psu.edu and request the Winter Wildlife Packet. In addition, there is a new Master Gardener training class scheduled to begin in March, contact us for more information.


Steve Ward
Master Gardener Coordinator
Penn State Cooperative Extension in Lackawanna County