Hey there everyone.
We have a wood rat(s?) around our house, who loves my chicken's feed. These are not your classic rat, like they have in the city. ( see link) Allegedly they eat eggs if given the chance, although I haven't seen it/them actually in the house at all. It seems content to gobble up any extraneous food in the chicken yard.
I don't want to poison them if possible, since I don't want my girls or my cats and dog finding the bodies and eating them. I haven't had too much luck with the havahart trap, either.
Any thoughts on how to catch them, or better bait, or anyone successfully deal with them before?
http://www.pestcontrolmag.com/pestcontrol/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=33050
Wood Rats
How about rat traps?
A small live trap baited with grain should get it and be safe from the chickens if left just outside their fence. Then it could be taken several miles away and released in a wilder area. According to what I just read, their home range is quite limited so the homing instinct could be equally limited. It's a cute little animal (unlike the real rat) and usually doesn't do much harm so it's a shame to have to destroy it. Good luck with whatever way you use. Dotti
They are super cute, not at all like " real" rats, plus they are endangered here ( of course). We haven't had much luck with hav-a-hearts yet, but we did catch a couple of them by shooing them into a big garbage can and let them go a few miles away :) Thanks for thinking of me. If anyone thinks of anything else, please let me know!
When we lived in Pennsylvania, we caught most of a family of baby wood rats (REALLY cute babies) with a Havahart trap and peanut butter. (They moved in under the bird feeder - convenient, huh?) For a while, we also caught a chipmunk who learned that we would let him go. Finally, after the third time he invaded the trap, I went into the house and got a BIG container of ice water. Before I opened the trap, I doused him with it. Talk about turning the air blue! It only took two times to teach him that the peanut butter was not worth the dousing. I don't know if the adults like peanut butter, but those babies couldn't resist it. We transported them up to the mountains. We never caught the adults, Rattleigh and Rattina (and Rattina II), just most of their babies. I thought they were really cute critters, not at all like city rats. They loved the silvery gravel that we had on our patio at the time, before we paved it. We found stashes of it all over the place. Just for fun, one time, we left a ball of aluminum foil out on the grass. A few hours later, the ball of foil was gone, and there was a large piece of gravel in its place. What a hoot! The whole soap opera of Rattleigh and his two Rattinas is really funny - maybe I'll post it sometime.
I've heard that sheets of 'Bounty' repel animals. I'm planning to give it a try with mice and rats that are getting into my 'feed box'. Don't know if it works yet.
If they're endangered, will your parks and wildlife rangers (or the NH equivalent) do something with them? Or will they just tell you to be sure not to harm them?
Sorry, that should read sheets of 'Bounce'. (The dryer sheets to stop static)
Well, for some reason only endangered rodents seem to come onto our property! LOL, I guess they know suckers when they see them ! I'll try the peanut butter idea.
Wood rats are related to pack rats, so that makes so much sense Nanu! How funny about the tin foil. Thanks for the ideas.
Nanubunny, now that's a story. Ice water! Still laughing...
Another Rattleigh story - wood rats don't normally invade the house. They are, however, extremely curious. We had a pipe that came out of the house, and there was a bit of a hole around it. It ran under the front stoop. (We turned a barn into a house, so it was still a work in progress). One day I was watching out the front door, when I saw Rattleigh amble under the front stoop and onto the pipe. As I watched, he sauntered into the house, and a few minutes later, he sauntered back out. Now, these guys are supposed to be pretty smart, but perhaps this particular specimen got short-changed in the brains department. I very quickly sealed up the hole. About an hour later, I was watching again, and, by golly, here comes Rattleigh, up the pipe. This time, however the hole was sealed up. He missed that fact completely, bumped his fuzzy little nose on my barrier, and fell off the pipe. I almost stopped breathing, I was laughing so hard. LOTS of entertainment that year.