Tag Archives: rats

A Rat Conundrum

We set rat traps yesterday. They are in boxes to stop birds and cats becoming involved in the attempted murder. This morning Julia reported both boxes had tails sticking out of them and one of the rats had, in addition, been partly eaten. Probably another rat, or even one of the rare cats we get. I give you this gruesome detail only to prove that it was dead.

By this afternoon, when I finally got myself enthused to deal with rat remains, both boxes were empty and all the bait was gone. There were, however traces of rat in both boxes.

I’m sure we killed one. The other may have been killed or merely stunned. Feedback on the trap website indicates that sometimes the springs aren’t strong enough and a rat can pull its head out and escape. It is probably a sadder and a wiser rat, but it is still breathing, though presumably less keen on the scent of peanut butter.

I’m a little worried by the thought of the amount of carnivorous activity going on in my flower beds, and even more concerned to find I’ve been spelling carnivorous wrong all my life. I haven’t needed to write it often, or my spellchecker would have pointed it out, but in my head it is spelt carniverous and I was very surprised to find it wasn’t.

Worse was to come when I tried to reset the traps. They wouldn’t reset. I tried to get help from the company website. First I was offered advice by a website that cropped up as I searched for the official company one. I hate it when that happens. They wanted £1 (refundable) to put me in touch with an expert. he chances of them having an expert on rat traps seemed unlikely. The likelihood of them using my payment details to steal money seemed slightly higher.

Then I was offered membership of a Discord group to seek advice. I’m vaguely familiar with the name but I don’t want to join anything just to get advice.

Feedback on Amazon indicates other people had this problem, but didn’t offer a solution.

Finally I found a video on how to set them, but there was no troubleshooting advice. Eventually, having spent half an hour searching and pondering I remembered some of the tricks of setting the old-fashioned sort of trap. Taking great care, I reset them whilst lifting the bait/trigger platform slightly. This allowed the catch to engage and they are currently lurking in the shrubbery.

We know here is at least one more, as we saw it after the other two traps were sprung.

I know it’s barbaric, but they spread diseases, kill water voles and make a mess in sheds. They also chase squirrels, which was very funny to watch but not entertaining enough to grant them a stay of execution. When we had one and it appeared once or twice a week I could put up with it, but we have been seeing two at a time nearly every day and something needed doing.

I think pictures of flowers might be good for this post.

Rats

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Squirrel in a bin – Clitheroe Castle

We had quite a lot of interesting bird and animal behaviour in the garden in the last few weeks – the regular appearance of greenfinches and goldfinches in the garden after a winter absence, the long-tailed tit that stared in at me, the squirrel eating samphire and, most notably, a rat chasing a squirrel. It was a small rat and the squirrel was quite a bit bigger, but it sill ran off. The rat tried to follow it into a shrub but the squirrel was up and away well before the rat could make a start.

I don’t like rats. I particularly don’t like rats when they come into our garden under the fence from other garden. We keep our garden as clear as we can from excess bird food and it annoys me that other people clearly don’t. Unfortunately we can’t keep it clean 100% of the time, even though we only feed modest amounts on the ground. If rats come out in daylight, they will find food before the birds have finished it. I say rats, there are two of them as far as we can see. We aren’t exactly overrun with them, , but we don’t want more so we have to act.

Squirrel at Rufford

The trap I bought, and baited with delicious peanut butter has failed to tempt them. Spreading chopped chillies on the ground failed to stop them, mainly because the pigeons ate the chillies before they could do any good.

Today, I have netting arriving and we will be attempting to block the route under the fence.

Other choices include ultrasonic devices, and strongly scented oils. I’m trying to avoid poisons (including baking soda variations), and the obvious cure – stopping feeding the birds.

I could also learn to live with rats, but years of keeping poultry has conditioned me to get rid of them. Same goes for the years of being warned of rat-borne disease.

No pictures of rats, so I went with squirrels.

Soup, Rats and Hitler

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Soup again today. Roasted butternut squash, leeks, garlic, water, vegetable stock cube. It doesn’t have many ingredients and it’s a simple recipe – roast veg, boil it up, blend. Done. You are forgiven if you are wondering why I used leeks as they don’t seem like natural partners. Regular readers have probably already guessed – after some bad shopping decisions and a holiday I had run out of onions. That was why Friday’s tea was cauliflower cheese with roasted calabrese. We nearly had roasted leeks but I needed them for the soup and the Sweet Potato & Chickpea Curry. I really need to put more thought into my menu planning.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and the evenings are feeling a bit nippy now. It will soon be time to unpack the jumpers and start doing other wintry things. We are hoping, as usual, to last September out without using the heating. This is even more important this year., with the cost of gas.

Earlier this evening I was browsing the internet and found an interesting article on farming in WW2. It includes a Ministry of Agriculture leaflet, as displayed below. As you may note, the rat has a Hitler moustache and fringe drawn on it – propaganda was simpler in those days. If I were a rat I’d be very upset about this. As you may recall, I am no lover of rats, after years spent working farms, but even I think they are getting a bad deal here.

Actually, I’ve just been thinking – when you look at the Putin/Poo Tin pictures that were done at the start of the war in Ukraine propaganda hasn’t moved on much.

However, there is a serious point behind the rat message – a rat can eat 15-20g of grain a day. In 14 months four members of the Women’s Land Army in Wales killed 7,600 rats. That number of rats could have been eating a ton of grain a week, which would produce about 1,700 loaves of bread. That would mean those rats could have eaten the equivalent of around half a million loaves of bread over the course of the war. And that is just in one part of Wales.

Day 134

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Got up, had a bacon croissant sandwich for breakfast, went to work and found a parking space. Home for lunch (it’s my half day) for vegetable soup I made last night. Does it get better than that?

The answer seems to be “no”. Nothing in the rest of the day, even watching Mega Shark Versus Kolossus and eating a Magnum choc ice, though good, failed to improve on the morning.

I suppose that an outbreak of world peace and a sudden dose of common sense influencing international politics would improve on a bacon sandwich, but it didn’t happen and so the day is tailing off. Julia will be making burritos for tea and Pointless Celebrities is on soon, so there are still things to look forward to, despite this anti-climax.

Yesterday, I found out a very interesting fact. Two, in fact. One is that rats and mice are unable to pass wind, in either direction. Julia said something very unkind when I told her this, but as I said, blame my healthy high-fibre diet. The second is that simply calling yourself “organic” doesn’t make you a nice person.

The reason I say this is because I found out how organic gardeners kill rats. Unfortunately, with neighbours who put out too much bird food and have BBQs and decking (all good stuff if you are a rat) I am forced to take action from time to time. I don’t want to poison a cat and I don’t want rats in the garden, so I use a trap. Organic gardeners have another method.

They don’t use poison, because that would be bad. They use baking soda, delivered in a number of ways,, usually mixed with peanut butter or a flour and sugar mix. The rats eat the baking soda, the soda reacts and produces carbon dioxide when it hits the digestive acids of the rat. And the rat, instead of releasing the gas, inflates.

You aren’t actually poisoning the rats, you are inflating them until their internal organs rupture. This, to me, seems a lot worse than simply poisoning or trapping them. Maybe I’m not cut out to be an eco-warrior.

Saturday morning and some time to spare

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A blue tit is squeaking from somewhere near our neighbour’s roof. I have seen or heard it several times and I have wondered if it might be nesting. There is a gap under the tiles and they have nested there before, though it seems a bit late in the season to be looking at a new site. According to naturalists on TV they have had a bad season this year, the cold spring preventing the flush of caterpillars that usually coincides with the hatching of their young. No food meant a poor success rate. We tend not to feed the birds these days because it attracts squirrels, magpies and rats. None of them are particularly welcome. Several of the neighbours over-feed, and some even put food out for foxes. I’ve told them several times that this causes rats, but they ignore me. One even told me that it was my unkempt nature plot that caused the rat problem. Not true. Rats need to eat, and there is nothing for them here. Gardens that leave out food scraps and hard boiled eggs are the cause of the rat problem, and gardens with decking. The stories I could tell you about decking . . .

I have actually sat in a neighbour’s garden and watched rats, in daylight, emerge from under their shed and climb the bird table to feed. The neighbour treated it as if it were a nature documentary. It’s not the fault of the rats, it’s the fault of humans who don’t have the sense they were born with.

After a lifetime killing rats on farms, and knowing a man who caught Weil’s disease whilst fishing, I don’t take rats lightly. There’s something about a rat that riggers a murderous impulse in me. I have actually seen people playing with pet rats in public, and have felt myself wanting to go over and kill it. Fancy rats, despite their colours and cute faces are just the same as the normal disease-ridden bird killing garden rat – they were originally bred from colour variations that Victorian ratcatchers found in sewers. Bear that in mind next time you see one.

Trousers, rats and vole-au-vents

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Yesterday comprised mainly of paperwork, a meeting and fighting my way through traffic. The latter was caused by having to pick up some alterations Julia was having done. We’re going to a wedding reception on Saturday night and she wanted her new trousers to fit. I’m have new trousers too, but I have lower personal standards in matters of appearance so mine will be going on straight out of the bag.

I haven’t actually bought new trousers for the reception, it’s just that time of year. Two pairs of black, two pairs of dark green and I’m set for weddings, funerals, interviews, casual wear and anything else the world may throw at me in the next 12 months. Last year’s trousers now become working garments and don’t ask me about the year before because I’m hard on trousers and after two years you can almost sense them sighing with relief as they split, tear or simply wear through.

Being a modern couple, Julia’s niece and husband got married abroad and are holding the reception in Nottingham because that’s where they live. Suits me. In the old days we’d have had to trek down to Suffolk, where the bride’s parents live, and I’d have felt duty-bound to complain all the way down.

I suppose that isn’t a bad trade off – an hour in traffic set off against a trip to Suffolk and back.

While I was parked behind a building waiting for Julia I was treated to the sight of a young rat cavorting in an overgrown margin. It seemed full of the joys of spring and looked very well fed, but you would do if you have access to an endless supply of discarded take-away food.

I used to shout at rats and throw things at them, but they don’t understand me and I always miss. I now take a more laid back approach and merely think bad things about them. I don’t like them but I’m not going to raise my blood pressure over them when it achieves nothing.

I have an inventive solution to the rat problem, which I wrote about a year ago but was never able to find a reason to use it. I have a reason now. It also addresses another modern problem.

They say you’re never more than six feet away from a rat (or two metres for my younger readers) and estimates vary from one rat per person to two rats per person, according to something I was reading recently.

These rats are free range and at six foot the food miles are not great.

Ah, the “food miles” bit rather gives it away. Think about it, rats are seen as a legitimate foodstuff in some parts of the world and they are certainly more traditional than tofu and micro-veg.

Free range local food. If you applied that label to chicken people would pay a premium for it.

I was almost saddened to see that both figures are probably wrong, with only one rat to share between six of us and a distance of 50 metres. However, it’s still a practical proposition, and with the new super rat there will be more meat to go around. Incidentally, that last link also says there will be three times as many rats as people, which is a good example of why it’s a bad idea to believe anything you read on the net.

If you don’t fancy a rat, how about starting with something smaller and cuter – the vole-au-vent. A cute rodent garnished with something tasty in a puff pastry shell. I’m wondering if I could send out a press release and get anyone to believe that. Or to see if I could get Heston Blumenthal interested in the recipe.

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Life after the Care Farm