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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Depending on which hemisphere of the Earth you're currently reading this from, summer is finally starting to fight its way to the surface. For the more "green" of our readers, that can mean it's time to start making plans for summer gardening. But as anyone who's ever planted something edible can tell you, garden pests such as squirrels are fantastically effective at turning all your hard work into a wasteland. Finding ways to keep them away from your crops can be a full-time job, but luckily it's a job nobody will mind if automation steals from humans.
[Peter Quinn] writes in to tell us about the elaborate lengths he is going to keep bushy-tailed marauders away from his tomatoes this year. Long term he plans on setting up a non-lethal sentry gun to scare them away, but before he can get to that point he needs to perfect the science of automatically targeting his prey. At the same time, he wants to train the system well enough that it won't fire on humans or other animals such as cats and birds which might visit his garden.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/30/training-the-squirrel-terminator/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @10:23AM
Cats of the Felis genus? true, but not true of those of the Leopardus genus, Lynx genus or Puma genus.
Oh, come on, there are other mammalian ground predators in the US who include birds in their diet - Bobcats, Coyotes, Martens, Minks, Ferrets, Raccoons, Skunks to name some, we're not talking about Stephens Island wrens [wikipedia.org] here..
I do appreciate what you're getting at though, the other predators listed above are part of the 'native' North American ecosystem whereas the domestic cat isn't.
Kudos for opting for the non-lethal solution, to stop the squirrels feasting on the bird food we put out over the winter, the food was heavily laced with cayenne and chilli powder, birds don't mind the chilli, squirrels and other mammals however...(though, as always, there are the usual exceptions [telegraph.co.uk], and I'm not upping the ante by wasting any Bhut Jolokia on the buggers...)