Satsuma mystery
Seven years after planting the 2 foot-tall plants, I had a guy scheduled to come cut the orange trees down. They had not produced a bloom or fruit. And then, I noticed one tree, about 15-20 feet tall, was covered with walnut-sized oranges.
On Wednesday, I had my yard mowed. No oranges were missing or on the ground. I look at the tree, 50 feet from my porch, on a constant, daily basis. No foot prints, no sign of animal hoof or foot prints or any animal poop, no tamped down grass underneath the tree.
This morning, at least 50 oranges are gone. One that had started to ripen was on the ground. It had a blemish. Five green ones are still on the limbs.
The limbs will not support the weight of a raccoon. No limbs are damaged, no leaves are missing.
It is possible for someone to have come inside my yard, which allows entry through 3 unlocked gates. It is possible to enter my acreage parameter fence, which is barb wire. It was to keep cattle in, not to keep humans out.
We have not had much rain, but we are not in drought. This is the weather pattern that produced the oranges in the first place.
So, a human came into my yard in broad daylight, was able to leave with a container of 50 oranges, and leave no trace. Plausible?
The yellow orange with the blemish was on the ground this morning, not yesterday.
Any ideas?
Our best guess is some homeless person looking for a garden happened to find oranges instead.
I am going to take a ride on my 4-wheeler, see if anyone has been stationary and camping out in the woods on my property.
We shall see.
Comments
I don't know about citrus...
I would think it was a varmint of some type. Squirrels come to mind. Good luck with your mystery. I hate losing a crop, but it is part of it.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
My oaks and pecan trees
are outside the yard, and only a hard wind would blow them over the fence.
I see squirrels rarely.
If a squirrel weighs roughly 12 oz., the limbs wouldn't support them. If the 2 1/4 dia. orange weighs 2 oz., the squirrel couldn't carry it.
There are no remnants of the missing oranges. No peels, no seeds, no nothing at all.
Hmmm...what critter eats citrus? Especially whole?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Ya got birds?
Maybe with a sweet beak?
Have heard of tropical birds
crossing the border
in spite of the trumpet de-fence
I am unaware if they have reached here.
We have hogs, but they are noisy and just churn up the ground. I don't think they could bump the tree and cause 50 or so oranges to drop.
I cannot think of any way this could have happened by an animal, and I seriously wish I could.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
perhaps it's the dreaded fruit snatchers
from Alpha Centaurus
thought the space force is
to protect us from such raids
perhaps the trillion buckaroos
in the budget could be audited
One never knows, but bushy-tailed tree rats, aka squirrels,
love naranjas. OTOH, 50 overnight, even the miniatures is a shit load to cart away one at a time.
However, how many trees do you have and what are the chances that all of the others have been stripped too?
blemished orange - blemished fruit is generally edible but has diminished retail value, jut saying.
be well and have a good one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I have 2 orange trees.
The second one has never bloomed, never borne fruit. The larger one did.
The blemish is not a deal breaker for me. I brought it in the house to ripen. But, the blemish was a deal breaker for someone/something.
We did drive the Kawasaki Mule around the fence line, checked to see if someone was camping out behind my home. No obvious signs.
Only a few people know the tree is in the yard.
Maybe it was someone walking down the road, looking for something to take.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Varmints
Really, OTC, I doubt the animal eating your satsumas is two legged.
I mean, it's Texas, where every other house is armed to the teeth. I have a hard time believing anyone is going to sneak onto your property in the middle of the night just for some little mandarin oranges and risk getting a 12 gauge hauled out.
Get one of those deer-feeder-cam thingys. That will show what varmint(s) are hitting your citrus. I don't think they're too expensive and I'm sure someone has them around your parts.
Squirrels aren't nocturnal, so that's out. Rats, yes. Opossum, sure. Racoon, why not? Sounds to me like mama Racoon with a bunch of young ones. They travel with her for some time. I've seen six or seven with mama and they can make a mess of things pretty quickly.
It was during the day.
A coon would have snapped the branches in two. This is a very flimsy tree.
No leaf loss. No broken branches. Perfectly snapped off oranges.
I wonder if someone out there is sending me a message. (For every case I take, there is an opponent. Been there, done that.)
And I am just like all the yahoos. I am well armed.
But during the day, I have a home that is empty.
Even coons would have left behind debris, and likely coon poop.
Nothing animal/varmint fits what happened.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Night and day
Guess I misread that it was happening at night. Maybe just presumed so. That does indeed change things.
Yes, daytime is a different story. No debris, odd. Yeah, an adult coon is a lot larger than many realize. As I didn't catch that you mentioned how fragile the limbs are, branches would have been broken. Plus, coons don't care whether they make a mess. But anyway, they're not likely to be out in the daytime.
Is the fruit low enough that a two-legged varmint could reach it? If some is too high for that without a mechanical picker/grabber gizmo, then it's pretty perplexing. Unless whoever did it had such a thing.
Yard guys?
Have you ever told anyone to come over and help themselves in the past? We've done that with our fig trees, and folks seem to think letting them do it once means forever ...even though we've been specific about that.
Sounds human, and an experienced picker
Maybe with ladder(s) on a truck and a ready market somewhere.
Not the first time for them.
The blemish would lower resale value.
Despoilations like this upset me terribly
On the other hand . . . we have ornamental peach
trees that are offsprings from three original trees from when we bought our house back in the beginning of the nineties. Every spring they have ornamental peach blossoms (really lovely) and those blossoms turn into small, ornamental peaches. When ripe they turn a yellow color with usually a tiny pink blush of color in one spot on them.
These peaches live up to their name and do not taste good, at least to humans. Squirrels, deer and chipmunks appreciate them though. As the peaches begin to ripen the deer will come eat them right off the trees. They spit out the small peach stones onto the ground. As more and more peaches ripen, though, they begin to fall to the ground in large numbers. The various critters just can’t keep up.
So my thought is that it is unlikely that animals are taking the fruit. Animals generally leave some signs of their visit as ours do. For the fruit to all disappear just as it ripens seems to indicate human activity. The rejection of the one blemished piece really sounds human. The deer camera suggested above sounds like a good idea.
Good luck and keep us informed.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
Seconding the “motion” regarding a concealed motion camera
Shawn Woods of Mousetrap Monday lives out in the country in Oregon, and has made an internet-era side livelihood out of trapping and filming critters.
In this one he helps keep an invasive species in check while also putting dinner on the table for his family:
https://mousetrapmonday.com/videos/catch-cook-eat-nutria/
In this one Woods explains how “Mousetrap Monday” came to be, with a connection to cancel culture (YouTube “cancelling out” the views of a million subscribers due to one complaint):
https://mousetrapmonday.com/videos/qa-why-i-create-videos-about-mousetra...
One of the things he’s concluded from his research is that every culture in every time and place has had a rodent problem. I’m sure the same applies to the problem and puzzle of theft and how to detect and prevent it.
Even though Shawn Woods is a haole (= white guy), as a hunter and trapper with a “feel” for the smaller wild animals and a lot of practical knowledge about how our human ancestors dealt with them, in his way he strikes me as a lot closer in spirit to indigenous peoples than many college-educated urban souls / fellow palefaces who claim to speak for them.