High levels of Ractivity

I do my very, very best to work hand  in hand with nature, but just sometimes our human activities tip the scales and create an imbalance.

There is an all too common belief amongst a vast majority of Britain's landowners - by which I mean primarily farmers, but also gamekeepers and, to be fair, smallholders and gardeners - that anything which comes onto our land without being invited is to be killed.

Be it rare birds on grouse moorland, foxes, hares, moles or deer, birds or beetles, there seems to be an uncontrollable urge to get rid.

I am no idealist. I realise that the countryside is managed for our needs. But there is a balance to be struck, for Britain's wonderful wildlife was in most cases here before we were and deserves a place to live and thrive.

But some creatures are, in certain circumstances, without a doubt intolerable and have to be treated as pests.
Slugs for one! They are an important part of our British fauna, but in the context of a vegetable plot, a manufactured environment, their population can cascade out of control. I don't use slug pellets but rely on night time forays and the day time duck squad to control numbers.

The pest I want to focus on today is RATS.

I did once sit and watch a colony of rats in a woodland setting and they were quite charming, but in the context of a smallholding they are not quite so desirable.
They are not helped by their long, bare skin tails and their protruding incisors which make them look, well, ratty.

When we moved onto the farm there was a huge rodent problem. The previous incumbents had done just about everything they could to make the place as welcoming to rats as possible.
It didn't take us long to get the situation under control. For most of the problem can be sorted by limiting food sources, clearing debris so rats have to cross open spaces and casuing lots of disturbance as rats are neophobic (they hate anything new).

But living amongst arable fields which are usually wheat and keeping poultry, we are always going to have to be on our guard against rats moving in. Why don't we want them?
For starters, they carry some very nasty diseases. They are destructive too, gnawing their way through anything if there is food on the other side. Worse than this, they will take young poultry and will actually eat young birds alive as they roost at night. We lost several ducklings this year which were in an enclosed stable as a rat managed to squeeze under the gap in the door.
The rats can be a pest in the veg garden too. If they get to the sweetcorn before it ripens they can take out the whole crop in a couple of nights. This happened this year.

For quite a few years we relied on the targeted use of poisons. Whenever we saw evidence of rat activity (I call it ractivity) we would fill up bait boxes and within a week the problem would usually disappear.

This year we had an excellent talk on pest control at the Fenland Smallholders Club. What struck me most was the move away from a reliance on poisons to a more traditional approach of trapping alongside good practice as discussed above.
So I invested in five Fenn traps and made boxes to house them to protect against catching non-target species such as hedgehogs.

The fen traps do their job very well. 

I don't like killing any animals, but this is necessary.

Unfortunately our switch in approach has coincided with an unusually bad year for rats. It's not because of the change in approach though, for this increase in the rat population is being reported by all the other smallhodlers I know. It is far more likely down to an exceptionally mild winter last year.

The traps are working, but the rats are clever.
They were avoiding passing through the wooden tunnels (with trap hidden inside) when I placed them in their runs, so now I am placing bait on the traps too. I am just using the same food I feed the chickens, a mix of grains and pulses. I make sure there is no chicken food left at night, which forces the rats to risk that which is in the traps.

As you can see the rats often manage to get the food without treading on the traps!

But we are catching enough.

I am catching on average one rat every day or so, but they have learnt to get at the food without treading on the trap. Instead they burrow underneath so that the food drops through. Clever little rascals.

A couple of dead rats placed out for 

the crows and owls

When I do catch a rat, I leave it on a gate post and it mysteriously vanishes.  I think the crows and the barn owls take them.
This is the good thing about not using poisons, I don't have to worry about harming other wildlife.

I think the current very, very wet ground will cut the population down and a nice cold winter would not go amiss. In the meantime, we are keeping abreast of the problem and I am sure we will see a return to lower levels of ractivity soon enough.