Get Rid of Rats in the Garden Now!

In a previous article, I mentioned how sparrows are like the rats of the sky and how these sparrows cause damage in the garden, the house and vehicles. These unfortunate experiences with sparrows motivated me into writing a series of articles on how to build a homemade bird trap. In one of those articles, I even detailed how the homemade bird trap was also able to trap rats at night.

Well, it appears those rats have become trap-shy over time. I think the rats grown bigger and bolder. With the heavy rains coming, I've also decided put away the bird traps for now.

Recently, I've seen bigger rats scurrying at the beams of the garden arbor. These rats are about a foot in length from head to tail. In comparison, the rats I caught with the homemade bird trap were smaller, at around seven inches from head to tail.



Tracking Rats and their Path

I'm an early riser at 5 am and I'm the only one thus far who has seen rats skittering on top of the garden arbor. I believe they're quite busy during the early morning hours too. Whatever it was they busy about, I tried to observe the horizontal metal beams that support the garden arbor every morning.

On a couple of occasions, I spotted a rat getting down from our roof's gutter and then down to the gutter's roof pipe. It then traversed along the porch's concrete moulding and to the garden arbor's beam, in the direction shown by the arrow as shown below.


It then hurried along the garden arbor's beam towards the perimeter wall as shown below. It climbed up the wall and rushed along the concrete wall's ledge. It then disappeared to the neighbor's house's roof.



Catching Rats with Mousetraps

When I still had the homemade bird traps, I've tried placing mousetraps on the beam. I wasn't exactly sure where they were going or coming from but I knew they were always after the bird or sparrow bait. Although I was able to catch a couple of small rats inside the bird trap, the mousetraps on the beam near bird traps didn't catch any.




Were they too clever to recognize the mouse traps? Sometimes the mouse traps remained opened and sometimes they shut. But there was no sign of a rat getting caught.


Glue Traps to Catch Rats

Another strategy was to use glue traps. Glue traps, when used indoors, are highly effective in catching small rats that manage to enter the house. But using them outside is a different story.

I placed rat glue on pieces of cardboard that were taped on top of the beams. The glue traps caught plenty of other critters. These included lizards, moths and even butterflies. At one point, a bird was probably trapped but managed to flee. A few bird feathers remained stuck to the glue trap as evidence.

Another disadvantage is that the excess glue tend to trickle down the sides of the metal beam thus creating a mess. Over time, because of the sun and rain, the excess glue started to dry up. So I just removed the glue traps and gave up on them because of the hassle.


So what's the next strategy? Rat poison bait! But how do you do it?

(See Part 2 for the continuation of this article)




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