Good Control over Chicken Eating Predators Bad for Rodent Control

[Janet Pesaturo]

Nice to meet you. I like many of your posts and your basic style of teaching people to understand the whole system. That adds a lot to this forum.

 

[centrarchid]

Not all will agree with that, but thank you none-the-less.


It is important to me that more dimensions be considered with respect to food production, especially when it comes to natural resource conservation. I do the intensive side of fish production and see that long-term efforts will need to be looking at more effective means of converting natural food web productivity into quality edible products. Current aquaculture and even the free-range chicken keeping practice by most has a lot more in common with feed lots or intensive confinement of chickens than we like to admit, especially with respect to nutrition.

 

[centrarchid]

IMAGE OF RODENT BURROWS

The rodents have move large amounts of soil forming hills I can not straddle with blade deck without cutting into soil. The burrows are everywhere.

 

[Janet Pesaturo]

Hmm, hard to say just by looking at an entry hole. You have quite a few species of burrowing rodents out there, from ground squirrels, to voles to moles to shrews to mice to rats, and several species of each. If you can't get a good look at the actual animals, it might help to narrow down by determining average size of burrow entry hole, and to look for associated sign, such as runs, scat placement, feeding sign, and above ground nests. Meadow voles, for example, make shallow burrows also more noticeable are the above ground runways and nests under clumps of grass. Also soil and moisture helps narrow it down. Prairie vole likes drier, sandier soil, whole meadow vole likes moister soil and lusher growth. Can you mount a game camera on a post near a well used hole?

 

[centrarchid]

I will try to catch some, preferably with a live trap of some sort. I will contact a conservation biologist to see what are best methods. My experience is limited to golden mice and white-footed mice as by-catch where voles where never caught even though we knew they were present. Once in a while a juvenile cotton rat would be trapped.