Camels and trees

[ozcamelgirl]

Hi
My 2 girls are in a wonderful new 40acre paddock and it took them all of 3 weeks to start doing serious damage to the little cluster of gum trees there.

I've been told by an arborist to wrap the trees in corrugated iron and will make a start on that, but any other suggestions to reduce the impact they have?

A professional camel handler said the trees could survive as long as they aren't completely ring barked, but the arborist thinks any significant damage might kill a tree.

Maybe they are eating the bark because they are looking for something feedwise that they aren't getting?

I can't imagine they kill off the trees in the outback by munching on them so heavily, otherwise they'd destroy a source of food.

Any comments, suggestions welcome.:)

Thanks
OCG

[3droms]

We find they ringbark the trees if we don't protect them. They have killed a few trees in their paddock. We wrap the trees in chicken wire to a height of at least 3-4m. We leave the chicken wire loose so the tree can keep growing. Chicken wire is easy to work with. It might be worth curling the wire in at the top as we had a kookaburra get stuck (somehow) inside the wire.

We found that giving the camels vitamins did nothing in regards to stopping them eating bark. I think it usually had more to do with their worm burden. It might be worth a egg count just to be sure.

[camelsinfrance]

TREES... don't mention them...
My girls absolutely love trees, they can be particular about them, we have the most enormous mulberry tree in our front garden and there's not a leaf on it below 3m - that goes for every other tree in the park too except a pine tree they use for shade!
Be careful with the wire, my girls used the tree that was wired up as a great scratching post and it came undone - fortunately i noticed before they caught their legs up in it!!

REINFORCED CONCRETE should do the trick!! :laughabove

[3droms]

Ours camels use the wired trees to scratch on as well. We have to check on the wire regularly. We actually wired one of our trees even though they were not eating the bark but because they were using it to scratch on and they were taking the bark off. The tree was oozing really badly from the damage.

There is only one type of tree in our paddocks that they dont eat.

Our camels love mulberry too. They don't have it in their paddock so we cut branches off one in our house paddock and feed it to them.