2 Days ago I got the "water vole" in the mini hav-a-hart trap in my green house !
yesterday I went in the green house and found the Victor's rat trap tripped and a sparrow smashed in it.
Baite on the Victor's is a half walnut tied on with dental floss.
How a bird got in there I have no idea !
How a water beaver vole got in there is a mystery also !!!!!!!!! But I figured it must have burrowed in...but a sparrow ?????????????
At our old place in dead-center Olympia, we found out that our friends who had told us we should raise pigeons for our new litter of Clumbers had neglected to tell us that when you raise pigeons, you are also raising rats. Now don't get me wrong, I have had pet rats, I rescued "my" lab rat from my Psych classes at end of semester, and I think they are cool critters and awesome. However, they need to stay away from my home and the birds we paid >5$ each for. So we started doing a "trapline". I cannot tell you how many times we'd be outside doing yardwork or whatever when we'd hear a SNAP! and one of our dogs would come to us hanging her head with shame.... rat trap swinging from her flews. We also caught tweety birds in the traps. And a possum (which, btw, are serious pigeon predators, too. Didn't know that until this..). We would also hide or stash the traps where we'd think other critters wouldn't be able to access
especially 65# Clumber Spaniels! Yet this kept happening since Clumber Spaniels have Jedi powers for pulling something they regard as food to within their reach.
What I finally did was go out in the middle of the night, furious to have found 2 more headless pigeons ($10!!) and more rat droppings in our loft, and bought a Gamo pellet gun at 10 minutes before close at Big5. With red light. I spent the next few months having sniper nights and setting up bait piles of peanut butter, nutter butters (my group's experiment at the UW was to find out if the rats learned a maze faster if they liked the reward more. They loved Nutter Butter cookies far more than anything else. News you can Use!), Ritz crackers, etc. I have no idea how many Gamo and I removed, but had the enemy been
actual rats at Stalingrad, I would've earned many medals there.
Was far more effective, was a little bit of fun and improved my marksmanship, and no more pulling snap traps from my dogs' faces.
Happily (and I am knocking on all of the
Amazon forest) we have not had a rodent problem out here in the near-sticks, yet.
