Mice /rats, subject comes up often.
Posted to another query.
Hope it helps.:
My understanding is that rats/mice are everywhere.
They will congregate and breed where there is available food, water, and shelter.
Look closely around any fast food restaurant and you will see rat bait stations.
They will eventually come, the idea is to prevent them from establishing a colony.
If you see 1, there are probably fifty.
If you see two or more holes, expect dozens.
Keeping a rat trap/bait station baited 24/7 hopefully keeps the population from establishing near your food source. Once established, they are very difficult to eliminate.
Remember, chickens don't attract rats, food does.
That said, I fabricated black 4 inch circular x 18" long drainage plastic pipe as a bait station.
Placed along the outside of my coop, looks like drainage pipe (not unsightly).
I put a t fitting in the center, capped, for easy viewing once a week.
Inside I maintain commercial rat poison.
My run has food scraps 24/7.
My coop has food access 24/7.
Water access 24/7.
5 years, no sign of rats or mice...
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the picture, I have a huge squirrel problem. I put out a block of poison inside a tomcat rat house, you know the ones that restaurants use and those squirrels carried the poison bar into the yard and my chickens almost got it! How do you avoid the squirrels carrying it off with them and dropping it? What kind of pellets do you use?
thanks bunches
Marie