David Owens, Extension Entomologist, owensd@udel.edu
This week’s shout outs go to Bob Rouse for explaining personal observations of most mammals and birds that usually attack seedlings and to Sylvie Childress for guessing a related rodent. Bob, I had a raccoon dig up every single pepper transplant out of treatment 2 and 5, rep 3 and 4 in 2018.
In the corn field in question, I found the ROUS hole a couple of yards away from the missing plants.
Bird damage has been observed in some fields recently and looks very similar. Often they will discard the leaves. Sometimes, a corn plant is rooted well enough to not resist being pulled out, and you may see beak injury like in this photo.