Another New-bee Question

I have dozens of squirrels... a few moles... a couple chipmunks... but no rodents... yet!

 

Once I started letting them free-range and left the run door open so they could go for water, I got mice.

 

I accept a certain number of mice are always going to come and go. I set traps and catch a bunch then they disappear for a little while. My Buckeyes also catch mice & one hen even caught a chipmunk!. The real scourge that you don't want is rats. If you have mice, then you usually DO NOT have rats as mice flee where there are rats -- natural enemies (so the only encouraging thing if you do get mice). There's not many places that do not have some mice.

 

Quote:Squirrels, moles, chipmunks are all rodents. So are beavers, ground hogs, gophers, shrews, marmots, porcupines. Anything with constantly growing front incisors is a rodent. (That is about 1/2 the mammals on the earth)

 

I got my first batch of mice after about a year. I'm still not sure how they're getting in, but I think they've tunneled under my neighbor's block wall, which is one of the four sides of my coop/run. I haven't found any other entry points and I buried wire cloth 1 foot under the perimeter on the other three sides. But I keep a "tin cat" trap baited all the time, and sometimes I catch some, and most of the time I don't see any signs at all. They're not the end of the world as long as you stay on top of the situation and certainly don't encourage them with extra feed and easy access. I pull my feeders out every night after dusk, and put them back in the morning just to keep them from taking over the joint.

 

It's inevitable. It took 3 years for my rodent population to explode to massive proportions, but it did happen. I think if I had been more vigilant about cutting back the population when I started to see them then I would not have had such a problem as I did last year. Rodents need to be dealt with proactively. I should have started trapping vigilantly at the first sighting and possibly even before that, but I'd trap a few mice and think to myself, "That'll be fine for now. There can't be that many more than just these guys."

So, my advice is to start setting some traps now and keep a handle on the population to prevent it from becoming a problem.

Good luck.

 

One word. CAT

 

I live on a farm and we have tons of rodents, field mice, chipmunks, moles and voles just to name a couple. there is no way of going around this around here and we had them before the chickens arrived. However I got real good pest control, for one the chickens, second the barn owls around here, the foxes, the hawks and of course blue jays and whiskey jacks all eat mice and small rodents.

I am not concerned about the rodents, they have been staying away from the house, in the spring and summer I sometimes find rodent nests in the barn. I take all the babies including the nesting materials the mother used and then wait for mom to come back when she does I get her too and relocate her and the nest of babies to the back of the land into an old broken down shed.
If they are in my house inevitably they will end up dead, cause I have cats, but if I can live trap them I will release them. I have rodent houses along the tree lines made of dowel and a tennis ball with a hole cut into them.

this year is the first one they have stayed away from the house, maybe because they are finding food out by the bird feeders and on the ground in the barn outside the coop. I really don't mind this at all. Because they are cleaning up the bits on the ground and there is nothing in there they can damage. All my feed is stored in large barrels that are covered. Only seen a mouse in the coop once, and never since. I find Dh spills food when he tries to give feed or snacks to the chickens, and that is what they are cleaning up.

Ema

 

We have mice and moles. They vary in population, but when spring and summer cometh, they dwindle down because of the ferel cats romping across the street to see what racket we have for food.

We also have 3 cats indoors and a ferel cat outside named "ATTILA".