i feel for you. i use traps, i use poisons n i learned how to shoot a handgun.
i'm always armed so i can shoot cute little bunnies that will eat a new tree to the ground. they like both twigs n leaves.
this latex doesn't seem to protect like people say it does.

Raccoons are the major branch breakers in my area on fig,plum,and peach trees.Sometimes the opossums show up at night in my large fig trees,but I haven't noticed any broken branches after they leave.

The deer will chew the ends of the branches off of new growth in the Spring and Summer on my plum and peach trees and some of the branches get pulled down and broken in the process.

The squirrels started on my apple trees about 10 days ago and I've picked up about 50lbs of apples that they bite on a few times,drop, and grab another one.

It might be a good time to get a terrier or Dachshund to guard your trees or borrow one. :)

I go after all of them year around, don't give them a chance to multiply during the year, period !!!!
 

I'm guessing you don't have cats or a dog? My 2 cats go after everything from moles to squirrels to birds. I also have a boxer and he's caught the possum twice already. It just plays dead and he lets it go though. He also chased a family of raccoons out. Now one of them is back along with the possum. I feed them both at night. Sometimes the coon comes around at dusk as well. Scared me a couple times. I open the door and he's sitting right there. One night I had the door open and he came in the house. I just told him to get out, he doesn't belong in the house and he left. Also told him he can have all the cat food he wants but no figs. If he hits the figs the dog is coming out. So far he hasn't touched a fig and he walks right past them every night.

The squirrels stay up at the tops of the trees now. I have watched one of my cats hunt them so they definitely don't come around to the danger zone anymore.

I sympathize with the animal problems

This may be redundant--I've written about my solution to foraging animals repeatedly, but I don't mind presenting it again. My solution to warm-blooded pests is a cheap solution of rotten egg, which I had noticed seems to be an important ingredient in all the expensive repellant mixtures.

Here's the recipe: mix 2 raw, scrambled eggs with 2-3 quarts of non-chlorinated water in a 1 gallon jug.  Let this stand at room temp for about 7 days, shaking it at least daily to prevent settling. 
Every day or two, or right after it rains, sprinkle small quantities around the plants that you want to protect. I often use an old paint brush to spatter it on the ground, but you can also dip the ends of thin strips of paper towel in it, and hang the strips on branches or pots that need protection. Just renew the strips every couple of days, bc they lose their potency. Human noses aren't as sensitive to this as you may think. Animals hate it.

A friend of mine was bemoaning the fact that deer were destroying his raspberries--he lives in a forested area, and actually had never even gotten fruit off of his plants. He used this mixture, and it solved the problem.

 The mixture stays 'bad' for 4-6 weeks.

I hope this works for you!!

A note on deer: I'm in suburbia, so deer are not a problem, but I've read that you can keep them away by stringing extra fine monofilament fishing line around the area to be protected, about a foot off the ground, and several feet from the protected plants. Deer get freaked out by anything that might bind their hooves, especially if they can't see it. You could also put it around the perimeter of areas to be protected. My spool of extra-fine cost a couple of dollars, and has almost a mile of line on it.

This is almost the same as cow grates used by farmers to keep cows from leaving a pasture through an open gate--it's an iron frame with parallel 1" wide openings on it. Cows won't cross it for fear of catching their hooves in it.

I hope this helps!
--Rick

If George Carlin raised peaches, I don't think he could have said it better. Me and the wife had a good laugh, and yes we hope you get those critters! (Be sure to post pics ;) )

410 shotgun

Another Tree Rat met his maker this morning. Fell victim to .177 lead poisoning while he sat on a tree limb eating the apple he just plucked from its branch.... Amazing how many tree rats and chipmunks come out of the woods to snack on my fruit trees; hard to keep up with them without just sitting under the trees all day long. Even the deer are making a real pain of themselves....

I'd seen maybe one squirrel in 15 years and I live adjacent to some pretty wooded area. Come to find out the neighbor lady has a high-powered pellet gun with a scope and she has been taking them 'out for years!

The deer in the other hand destroyed all the fruit trees I planted dispite puting up a fence. Death to all deer. The moron living next to me actually has a deer feeder!! That ought to be illegal! !!

Anyway, sorry for your loss.

.22 suppressed

7 groundhogs and 13 chipmunks this year, more than every other year combined.  No idea why they've been so bad this year.  

Deer Feeders have increasingly come under fire due to the expansion of Chronic Wasting Disease in deer. In NY, it is illegal to purposely feed deer so most times, the deer are being feed incidentally to folks feeding birds, etc... Not legal to take deer out in closely populated backyards since a stray projectile of any kind can have dire consequences.... Paint balls on the other hand provide both audible, visual and tactile feedback to a deer and are less likely to cause damage or raise the ire of neighbors should a ball go astray in close quarters... have also found that deer actually avoid plants sprayed with those deer nuisance sprays although the spraying has to be pretty frequent to keep the scent fresh...

At night you have to consider mice and rats too. Seem to my main problem with fruit and now tomatoes also. Check out the Kania Trap online. Several friends swear by it and I think I will have to resort to it also. I live in the city but have racoons, possums, squirrels, birds mice and rats all competing with me for fruit. I recently lost whole tree fulls of unripe peaches, plums, mulberries, and they are working on the figs and tomatoes now. Some friends have just given up. Oh, and I have two cats and a dog that don't do their jobbs.

I have not seen raccoons near my yard till yesterday.  It was a young one dead on my side of property next to my neighbor's fig tree.  I do not know how it died, but I know their dog like to chase squirrels and the like.  It was a necessary "chore" to bury it, but I am quite happy to do that.

As for putting up a fence against deer, I have not had any issue since...I set up a fence around each tree I want to protect.  The fence is only 4-5' high.  Due to the small space inside of the fence, with a tree.  Deer will not jump over it into that small space. 

js -- 

I want to thank you for sharing this.  Your message motivated me to get more diligent about protecting my various crops from pests.  In the past two nights I've caught two possums in a trap located among my fig trees and not far from my peaches.  I ate my first main crop fig and my first ripe peach today.

Yesterday I was discussing fruit with a friend.  He told me that he had lost a treeful of apples in one night.  Then a treeful of pears another night.  He said that the ground was meticulously clean -- no sign of the carnage.  It reminded me of your story.  But here's the kicker -- he has the culprits on camera!  It was a raccoon mother with three kits.  I couldn't say for sure that deer didn't help out once the fruit was on the floor.  But it was raccoons that did the dirty work of climbing the tree and knocking the fruit down.