You are right about the opossums and raccoons. The raccoons in particular are smart, and the big ones are strong too. I had to really “re-fortify” our chicken house and run, plus go to war with the buggers: I got a few of those “dog-proof” raccoon traps. They also turned out to work well on opossums.
Still, we have lots of good “cover” around, and there are plenty of birds singing here in the mornings to wake us up!
Some sort of bird has also been dining on our tomatoes...
The tomatoes might be getting eaten by tomato or tobacco hornworms- they will scoop out your tomatoes before bothering with the leaves, looks like a squirrel or groundhog took a few bites but it’s a caterpillar of a moth that flies in the evenings and loves 4 O’Clocks. The caterpillars are very hard to spot even though they grow to an impressive size. Check your plants closely morning and evening for a big fat green caterpillar with white slashes on its sides.
Sometimes you will find a big hornworm with what looks like white eggs sticking out of it... leave those alone, they will never mature to reproduce because the white eggs are those of a parasitic wasp...and you’ll want lots of those wasps if you like tomatoes.
While I’m on this thread, I have a slightly OT question:
We have a bird here (mid-South region) I’ve never definitively sighted, but it is common to hear in the evenings around lakes and ponds with wooded areas nearby. I call it “the MTV bird”, because, depending a bit on the bird, its call sounds like “video-video-video” - pause - repeat.
Does anyone know what this is?
Could also be stinkbugs.