Rats

I've been having rat issues in the greenhouse.  I've known that there's been something in there for a while, but I'd really hoped that wishful thinking would take care of it.  Sadly, it hasn't.

All of the little sprouts of lettuce, kale, and arugula are gone.  They don't seem to like cilantro, except how it feels between their toes.  The potatoes from the barrel are taking a beating.  There are holes dug under all the back corners of the cold frames.

To quote Bugs Bunny, you realize this means war.

I'd really rather not use poisons.  The worry is that poisons will be passed through the food chain to other wildlife when they find a dead rat and eat it.  So I tried other options first.  I looked around on line for information on making snares for them.  One English site said to make them out of some kind of braided wire usually used for fishing leaders, so I went to my local hunting and fishing store and asked if they had that sort of thing.  The salesman told me it was the wrong time of year, and that I might be just as well off using wreath wire and I should see if the hardware store had any.  The hardware store said no, and sent me to the craft supply shop right next to the hunting and fishing place.  I ended up getting a 4 ounce roll of 26 ga. steel wire, painted green.

For my readers not from around here:  Downeast Maine makes a lot of Christmas wreaths in the fall, which are shipped all over the country.  This is a cottage industry, and there are wholesalers who buy wreathes and ship them.  Because of this, wreath wire, which is thin florist wire, is fairly easy to come by.

So I brought this home and looked again at the diagrams for making a snare.  The loop itself is straight forward enough, but he triggers are tricky.  The idea is to have a bent whip that, when the rat jiggles the trigger, will snap the noose back and hoist the rat into the air by it.  I tried several options for triggers, including nails barely wedged into cracks in the greenhouse sill, and slats that were notched into thin stakes in the ground.  Once I got into the task, I just started making loops and putting them in runs without a trigger.  They didn't seem like they'd be very reliable but wire is cheap and setting them up is easy.

I haven't caught a single rat.

I'm going to go back to plan A, which is to try to deny any path of entry.  The ground is thawing fast and I have the metal to finish the barrier around the east side where they're coming in.  I'm also going to proceed to plan C, which is to use the poisons, and limit the exposure of other wildlife by trying to deny the rats access. 

I'm also putting some in covered locations near the hen house.  I'm seeing a lot of traffic along the fence, and occasionally seeing one actually in the hen house.  I've had snap traps set in a trap box all winter and haven't caught anything that way.