Rats or Chipmunks?

[aart]

So it has been 5 days since I shot at the rat and covered over the tunnels. They remain undisturbed. I've watched, with air rifle ready, for activity at dusk and have seen nothing. The baited and set traps were undisturbed until this morning when I found another chipmunk.

All good signs, right? Unfortunately, my husband said he saw "something" near the pallet deck that "might have been something" that he thought "could have been a rat" in the morning 2 days ago when he let the dogs out. I grilled him on the details but got nothing more. I'm counting this as an unconfirmed sighting.

Quote:

No doubt there...one rat sighted/caught usually means many more somewhere close, and they are sneaky hard to trap SOB's.

...from what I've read...
Thankfully I've never had to deal with them, just mice in every outbuilding, the grill, and garage under house (only 2 in house in 17 years).
Had a bloom of chipmunks/ground squirrels, and black squirrels, around this spring...but they mostly seem to have dispersed elsewhere.
I live rural and think natural preds keep the numbers down.

 

[Intheswamp]

Change your bait and go through the unbaited trap stage again. Use small slices of a hotdog wiener.

Best wishes,
Ed

 

[chickybaby1]

My rats are continuous. I trap and kill, more move in. Because they smell the past rats.
I remove feed and water overnight, pour hundreds of dollars worth of repellents, trap,
and still rats, squirrels, chipmunks, sparrows, all rule the roost. tie raw chicken onto the tigger and set many traps its part of chicken life. mix ratx in with some dog food leave out overnight. Rat management is taking time and money but persist we must.

 

[Al Gerhart]

I know the regular readers think this is like a broken record but threads like this come about because people don't know the basics.

Find Howard E's excellent Rat 101 post on this site and read it. To eliminate rodents you need sanitation, exclusion, and elimination in that order. Do the first one right and you don't need to worry about the other two.

Sanitation, put your bulk feed in metal barrels, clean up any cover the rodents can use to get to and from the coop to where they nest so natural predators have a shot at catching them, and get your feed in a proper treadle feeder. By proper I mean spring loaded door, narrow and distant treadle, heavy counterweight, inward swinging door, and no plastic parts that rats can chew through.

You gotta have some full sized birds to operate the treadle. Not a good idea to use with birds under three pounds for safety reasons and they don't have the reach or the weight to work the treadle.

Or you will spend hundreds of dollars on poison and traps and lost feed every year until you spend the $100 for a decent feeder. Once you have stopped feeding the rodents they will leave. It is that simple.