Hi i had exactly the same problem, suddenly I saw a rat and I also found where he was living, under a bush with a telltale mound of earth. I was advised to stop feeding the birds, but like you I just didn’t want to stop as fledglings were coming etc. My husband devised this contraption which results in no food dropping to the ground and I haven’t had a problem since. The rat must have moved away as there was no easy pickings and that was about a year ago and I’ve not seen one since.
Love it. I do this too, but I'm not sure there's a dish big enough for my sparrows seed flinging ability! 😄
I'm not sure this works with rats or just mice, but I've seen "walk-the-plank" type traps that attach to the top of a 5-gallon bucket. If you put a few inches of water in the bottom of the bucket, the mice soon drown. You can then dispose of the remains in the woods or a field for scavenger animals without risk of introducing poison into the food chain. I know you don't want to kill them, but this can serve as information for anybody else with a similar problem without those qualms.
I have no qualms about killing rats in as humane a manner as is possible for me. I consider myself to be part of nature's world and not some morally superior 'other' ... I think it's amazing that a person will watch a pride of lions herd zebra over the edge of a cliff or single out and hunt and kill a gnu to provide its family with food, and marvel at it; whereas the same person considers it wrong for me to trap and kill a rat in order to protect my family's home and food. I just don't get it.
And by the way, I lived most of my life in very rural parts of the countryside with hardly a house in sight ... if some town-dwelling person turned up on my land and let loose the rats they'd trapped on their property, and put the skylarks' and other ground and riverside nesting birds' eggs and nestlings at risk, and potentially infect the local water with Weil's disease, let alone damage electrical wiring in sheds and barns causing heaven known how many fires in which animals die, their stored food/bedding destroyed and sometimes people are killed I'd be flamin' livid. 😡 Have you any idea of the damage rats do on a farm?! They don't live there happily in some sort of benign rural idyll.
We should all take responsibility for ourselves and not expect other people to do the tough stuff for us.
Oh, and by the way, I'm also considered to be a lefty and I read the Guardian.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
I've done it @pansyface ... we used to rear animals for meat and I would kill pluck and draw and dress poultry and game myself as my father taught me, and we took our own animals to the wonderful local abattoir where the animals were not stressed and I have watched the entire process.
As children we always knew that the pigs we reared were destined to become pork chops and sausages ... it didn't result in them being treated with any less respect and care than our labrador.
I do think there's an argument for saying that no one should eat meat unless they have at least watched it done properly and in person not on the tv etc .......... that way people would be more connected with their food and it would be much harder for some of the bad practices in the 'industrialised' sections of the meat industry to be hidden.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Sadly a lot of the smaller abattoirs have closed down, for various reasons. We were lucky in that our local one was well supported by farmers in the area ... the owner was well respected and trusted ... he had grown up rearing animals himself.
We now buy our meat from a local farm butcher who sells their own and their neighbours' animals ... like us they keep tight control over the way their animals are treated.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
The neighbours have restarted work today, so maybe they'll bugger off. No sign of anything at night, (I work nights, so can sit out till all hours when I'm not working), no feed left out.. apparently they don't like garlic, so I've sprayed the hell out of half the garden and fencing!
I guess the real question is how many of us would be happy to have rats roaming about in the house ? What measures, if any, would you resort to at that point ? Would you be concerned about the possibility of them accessing your neighbour's house too ? Not all houses are built to rat proof standards. They disturb any insulation, chew thru wiring and make a heck of a racket when scurrying around above your head. Rats are incredibly smart and also fast breeders. They won't necessarily limit themselves to your garden - any little access into a building which provides a nice snuggly den when the colder weather arrives will be taken advantage of. We are all looking for a more comfortable existence after all - rats included. Stands to reason that unless your property is completely isolated, you do risk spreading the problem. That's how mine arrived - my garden, next door's shed ( animal feed in storage ) blocked that off and they climbed the adjoining fence, nipped under the roof tiles, lots of nibbling at the roof felt and Hey Presto - rats in between floors and in the main roof space. I didn't enjoy burying the corpses from the trap but then again, I doubt whether anyone else would have either. In the majority of cases, you either deal with it or you leave it to others to do the dirty work for you.
I mostly try to leave animals to do their own thing, but I don't have a problem with killing mosquitoes or termites or fire ants or, yes, even rats. The gray squirrels eating all my bird seed annoy me but they don't typically spread disease as mice and rats do so I leave them alone.
Posts
And by the way, I lived most of my life in very rural parts of the countryside with hardly a house in sight ... if some town-dwelling person turned up on my land and let loose the rats they'd trapped on their property, and put the skylarks' and other ground and riverside nesting birds' eggs and nestlings at risk, and potentially infect the local water with Weil's disease, let alone damage electrical wiring in sheds and barns causing heaven known how many fires in which animals die, their stored food/bedding destroyed and sometimes people are killed I'd be flamin' livid. 😡 Have you any idea of the damage rats do on a farm?! They don't live there happily in some sort of benign rural idyll.
We should all take responsibility for ourselves and not expect other people to do the tough stuff for us.
Oh, and by the way, I'm also considered to be a lefty and I read the Guardian.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
As children we always knew that the pigs we reared were destined to become pork chops and sausages ... it didn't result in them being treated with any less respect and care than our labrador.
I do think there's an argument for saying that no one should eat meat unless they have at least watched it done properly and in person not on the tv etc .......... that way people would be more connected with their food and it would be much harder for some of the bad practices in the 'industrialised' sections of the meat industry to be hidden.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
We now buy our meat from a local farm butcher who sells their own and their neighbours' animals ... like us they keep tight control over the way their animals are treated.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Traps and poison did nothing at all ......
No sign of anything at night, (I work nights, so can sit out till all hours when I'm not working), no feed left out.. apparently they don't like garlic, so I've sprayed the hell out of half the garden and fencing!
What measures, if any, would you resort to at that point ? Would you be concerned about the possibility of them accessing your neighbour's house too ? Not all houses are built to rat proof standards. They disturb any insulation, chew thru wiring and make a heck of a racket when scurrying around above your head.
Rats are incredibly smart and also fast breeders. They won't necessarily limit themselves to your garden - any little access into a building which provides a nice snuggly den when the colder weather arrives will be taken advantage of. We are all looking for a more comfortable existence after all - rats included. Stands to reason that unless your property is completely isolated, you do risk spreading the problem.
That's how mine arrived - my garden, next door's shed ( animal feed in storage ) blocked that off and they climbed the adjoining fence, nipped under the roof tiles, lots of nibbling at the roof felt and Hey Presto - rats in between floors and in the main roof space.
I didn't enjoy burying the corpses from the trap but then again, I doubt whether anyone else would have either.
In the majority of cases, you either deal with it or you leave it to others to do the dirty work for you.