Came home to find my pear tree stripped bare overnight

[fridgefullofplums]

Returned home to find my pear tree (back garden) stripped clean. No sign of any on the ground or anywhere nearby. I am gutted!!!! It was my best ever crop and those pears were a thing of beauty. Any ideas if any bird or animal could have done this is such an efficient and successful way?

Parakeets are noisy buggers though, you must have heard them?

Bloody hell, the cheeky fucker! What did you say?!

My corn on the cob plants were trampled. Looked like they had been stamped on, all cobs gone. I honestly thought it was human idiots. It happened to a few other plot holders so one of them put up a wildlife camera and caught the culprits: badgers. I was very happy it was wildlife and not lowlife! They will eat pears and can actually climb a tree to get them.

That thieving tosser would be fertiliser for my next crop.

Birds have been at my apples, but I don’t know of any animals that will tidily strip everything. I’ve just picked my last plums for jam, very untidy it was!

How big is the tree? If it's anything under ten feet then I'd go human intervention, but if it would need a big ladder and lots of equipment to pick every single pear then it's probably wildlife.

I’d feel ok with the local wildlife having a good meal but I’d be livid if it was a neighbour!!

is your garden overlooked? It seems so cheeky given your garden isn’t really accessible

so I’m going to conclude it was a well planned attack by the local wildlife - squirrels forming the ground invasion and the local parakeets/starlings coming in from the air. Hedgehogs and mice helping with the evidence disposal on the ground

I've got a mental image of something out of a Percy the Parkkeeper books...

Like that episode of The Good Life when Barbara set Geraldine the goat on him!

Possibly stolen to sell. A whole tree's worth of pears would be a few boxes of fruit. Stealing food is a thing now apparently.

In a friends village last year, a man stole a whole box of jars of honey from the doorstep honesty box of a local beekeeper. And he didn't just take one or two jars - he stole the lot. He drove past, reversed back (after probably seeing the 'honey for sale' sign), parked out of sight, walked down the path, helped himself to all the honey on the doorstep and the contents of the honesty box, then left. He even came back again the next week to steal another load. Obviously it sold well.

The same man also took all the apples left out in the village - he even took the boxes, buckets and baskets that the apples were in. He also stole all the eggs from the honesty box of the lady with chickens. So the village no longer has honesty boxes or 'free apples help yourself'.

According to the Police, the honey-nicker is thought to be from a Romanian or Albanian gang - apparently they do a lot of it - they steal from honesty boxes and sell the produce for cash. It's easy money for them.

So thanks to thieving scumbags, we can wave goodbye to the British tradition of honesty boxes and selling surplus produce on the doorstep.

😳 bloody hell, what did you say when you copped him? What was his reply?!

Wanker 😡

Gone to the conference to get to the core of the issue...

Oh come on. Animals wouldn’t take a whole tree of fruit without leaving a single trace on the ground or anywhere. Of course it’s humans.

We had hundreds of walnuts on our tree this year. Didn't manage to harvest a single one. Squirrels in our case too.

Ostrich?

They (squirrels)have eaten my magnolia grande flora flowers for the fourth year running.

No gooseberries either this year.

I live in an outer London suburb. A friend a couple of miles away saw 2 women systematically stripping the plums from his tree in the front garden and I have seen similar with a fruit tree on the lawn outside a very old hunting lodge. Our large neighbouring forest has strict rules about not gathering fungi, fishing to keep you catch or foraging edible wild plants but lots of people from countries where it is thought ok (and trendy chefs) still keep doing it. They are prosecuted and fined heavily if they are caught. The fungi gatherers have big carrier bags full and sell them to middlemen for restaurants, so it is not for personal consumption.

My apple tree is a bit out of control, needs cutting back which will be done in the autumn, but this year it had more apples on it than I have ever seen it produce. Most of them too high to pick but between them the blue tits, magpies, parakeets and blackbirds have had the lot. Not overnight though! I think it was a really important source of food for them this year so was pleased to see it .

ps another one hoping for an update on the pick your own produce thief caught in a garden!

Parakeets will strip a tree like that.

The fact it happened so quickly points to humans. My whole hazel tree was stripped of nuts very quickly by a couple of chancers. They were so greedy they were breaking branches to strip off the nuts. They didn't realise they were standing right next to our CCTV camera. I put the coverage on Facebook and it turned out it was a local headmaster and his OW.

How many pears were there roughly?

We returned from holiday one year to find a woman in our garden picking our plums .
When she saw us she didn’t even look embarrassed, just said we had plenty so why not !
She was not happy when I insisted she leave them .

I thought you were going to say your dh had chopped it down!

Like what happened to MiL’s pear tree. I don’t think she ever forgave FiL for doing it while she was away.

@fridgefullofplums
Neighbours or entitled passers by
My neighbour has a beautiful quince tree ( I think it is) in his front yard
I've even had strangers knock asking me for permission if he's not there
One front security door camera later though
Different story