Posted: Friday 4 January 2013
by Kate Bradbury
For the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with ‘a slight rodent problem’.
For the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with ‘a slight rodent problem’. It all started in autumn. The sudden and happy arrival of the goldfinches in my garden was followed by the equally sudden but unhappy arrival of a rat.
My suspicions had been raised when tunnels appeared in the borders and holes in the compost bin became a little too wide and numerous to be the work of a wood mouse. Then, my fears were confirmed when I emptied my compost bin and the rat shot out.
I’m not against rats and think they should be tolerated where possible, but there are three factors that make them undesirable residents of garden compost bins:
• they breed like the clappers and gather in large social groups
• they’re extremely clever and expert at tunnelling, so can easily access buildings
• they carry Weil’s disease, which is potentially fatal to humans
I paid close attention to my garden and realised I had to act when I spotted Ratty mopping up split niger seed from the bird feeders in broad daylight. It was evidently quite at home.
I love goldfinches, but they’re such messy eaters. On top of that, niger seed is incredibly free flowing. For every one seed in the goldfinch, at least three ended up in the rat (or so it seemed). I reluctantly took the feeders down.
I bought a humane trap, with the romantic vision of catching our rat and releasing it in a field, where it could roam free with owls and badgers. But, being extremely clever, the rat worked out how to take the food from the trap without setting it off. And then a mouse moved in. I had a mouse living in my rat trap.
It’s often noted that rats don’t like wet compost heaps, nor do they like loud noises. It’s therefore easy to evict them because you simply keep your compost moist and bang the bin loudly. I put the theory to test by removing the bin lid, emptying a bucket of cold water on to the heap every day and hitting the bin with a rake whenever I went past. The rat was indeed evicted, but it always returned within a few days. There’s a limit to how many times you can take a rake to your compost bin without arousing the suspicion of your neighbours.
With other methods exhausted, I took drastic action. I emptied the compost bin and chased the rat out of the garden. There was no poison involved, or bloodshed, just a little running and a threatening gesture with a spade. My garden is now rat free, but I can’t compost, the birds are gone and there’s a mouse living in the rat trap.
I’ve fixed trays to the base of my feeders to catch any discarded seed, and I’m hoping the goldfinches will return soon (they’re probably in Spain at the moment anyway). I’ve also bought some sturdy chicken wire, which I’ll attach to the base of my compost bin to prevent access. But there’s little I can do about the location of the garden. Backing onto a busy cycle path that runs between a pub and a bus stop, it’s routinely littered with pizza crusts and chicken bones. It’s easy to blame the goldfinches, but the problem lies with us.
Many thanks to Amy Lewis, Wildlife Trusts, for kind permission to use her image.
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