The war against barn rats

Photo:  A rat that Rocky caught a few months ago, after it had munched rabbit pellets all night and left it's own little pellets behind to foul up the rabbit food

There was a huge rat in a trap this morning.  It's reason to celebrate, strange as that may sound!

What we're finding is, we can't catch them no matter how many traps we put out or how much we experiment with yummy bait to lure them in.  They are clever, and too smart to get caught in a trap, especially since their network of tunnels gives them ways of sneaky travel that take them in safety anywhere that they want to go.  (They must be aware:  Why bother stepping around a trap, when you can run through the tunnels inside the walls in absolute safety?)

UNLESS:  a major disturbance is created in their expansive, barn-wide tunnel system.  Then, they seem to start scurrying around, not as sure of themselves, having to forge through new territory, and will get snapped.  They don't even seem interested in the peanut butter with a scrap of marshmallow on each and every trap.  They just get snapped on their way through, trying to find access back to their cozy dens.

We spent a good part of Saturday digging out an area next to the foundation where the silo meets the walkway from the barn.  Numerous rat tunnel entrances were dug in the soft dirt there over the course of spring and summer, Shadow and Rocky (rat-hunters extraordinaire!) had dug deep and never caught one, and the foundation seemed to have enough tunnels going under it that we wondered if it would collapse.  

The dogs could smell the rats UNDER the foundation, along the cracks where the inside floor meets the wall of the walkway.  I knew that they weren't fooled when I heard the angry squeaking below floor-level, and saw that the dogs were moving along the crack in the same way that they follow a rat that is under a board, or that is just-out-of-reach in the depths of the manure pile.  The rats were under there, and there were more than one.  Both dogs had their noses rubbed nearly raw as they tried to follow the changing locations of several rats, which were safely under the floor.  There could have been a whole family down there, and the dogs couldn't do a thing about it.  Infuriating!

So, Saturday's work was digging, setting up a "curb" form with some old boards, and pouring concrete.  It took 5 bags, just for one location. 

We had to keep Bessie away from the wet concrete.  We had to put the dogs in the house, because all they wanted to do was their usual morning task:  Locate the rat, have me move/dig/help them get at it's location, then team-work as they flushed it out and killed it.  

But it worked.  The rats are confused.  Their easy-access, summer-long tunnel system is interrupted.  Yesterday morning, a rat was in one trap.  This morning, a bigger rat was in a different trap.  The barn-cats-in-training (3 kittens) up in the hayloft got to fight over the prizes, and two more rats were out of the picture.  I have no idea how many more there are (inside the barn, outside, under, everywhere--Shadow even scented a trail that comes straight from the chicken/rabbit shed to the barn wall!).  I don't think we've even made a dent in the population.  It's a start.

As for that nice new "curb":  A rat tried to tunnel under it just last night, and didn't get very far.  It dug a new tunnel, about 10 feet away and under the milking-room floor, where there is a crack in the foundation.  More concrete to pour, and steel wool to shove into the nooks and crannies of the foundation in that area.

We're probably waging a war that will never be over.  But if we DON't wage this war, the rat population will never be controlled.  Finding rat poop in the walls is bad, but finding rat poop inside the big containers of feed is downright disgusting.  Finding tunnels dug in the dirt is bad, but finding tunnels CHEWED through the supporting posts of the barn is going to keep being a problem and could eventually mean that the barn simply collapses into itself. 

It almost makes me miss the raccoons that we had to shoot up in the hayloft.  Might have been coincidence, but.....coons eat rats, and we didn't have a rat problem in either of those first 2 years, when the coon mamas were having babies inside of the barn walls.  Which is the lesser of the two evils?!!!

 

Laura
http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/