Tag: Brown Rat

Visitors

Grey Squirrel

squirrel

Soon after I finish picking up the rowan twigs I’d been pruning, a squirrel appears, carrying two peanut shells. It leaves one near the top corner of the bed and selects a spot near a plant in near the centre to bury the other.

Refilling the hole and ‘making good’ – to use a builder’s expression is a thorough process.

It picks up the peanut it left earlier and buries it with equal care near the beech hedge.

Song Thrush

thrush

The song thrush is back again for another feed on the berries before they finally drop from the sumac.

thrush

These were taken on my iPhone.

Brown Rat

brown rat

Back in the summer we saw a large brown rat scuttling across our patio in daylight and decided to take a break from feeding the birds. Three months later this didn’t seem to have made any difference as we’d still occasionally one passing through so we’ve started filling the feeders again.

When I’m doing that I inevitably spill a few sunflower hearts, assuming that the birds will soon spot them.

This afternoon though it was a medium-sized rat climbing one of the garden chairs to search around for spilt sunflower hearts on our patio table.

I’ll be more careful next time I fill the feeders but we will keep on feeding the birds. The local rat population is something that we will have to live with. All our neighbours report the same problem.

The Cat and the Rat

cat in the hedgeA neighbour’s cat watches intently through the hawthorn hedge from its vantage point on next door’s concrete coal bunker.

It pounces and chases a brown rat, coming close to catching it. The rat looks healthy enough but it has been behaving strangely, roaming about in the afternoon sunshine, showing little concern for danger. For a while it stopped and was nibbling at the edge of the frosty, still mainly snow-covered lawn. brown ratPerhaps it has eaten poison bait put out by one of our neighbours and it’s now feeling thirsty, which seems to be one of the symptoms of rat poison. Ponds are currently deep frozen so perhaps it was quenching its thirst with ice crystals.

Rodents

rat hillsTWO WEEKS ago one or two small mounds of earth appeared near the bird table. I tried to persuade myself that they might be molehills but I realised that it was more likely that they were the work of brown rats attracted to the quantities of sunflower hearts spilt by the birds that use the feeders.

We’ve stopped feeding which is a shame as it’s been such a pleasure to see the regular goldfinches, greenfinches, blue tits, great tits, house sparrows and siskins, up to 20 of the latter at a time.

rat burrow, compost binAm I making a mountain of a problem out of molehill? A hole has also appeared beneath the compost bin and that must be the work of a rodent. Our neighbours report that the rats have actually nibbled holes to get into their compost bins. They’ve put a couple of baiting boxes down.

I’m going to move our compost bin to a more open position. Hope they’ll get the message and move on.

Lost Pond

frogMore bad wildlife gardening news; our neighbours have filled in the pond  in the corner by the hedge as their garden has to accomodate a growing number of young children. When our previous neighbours originally put in this pond almost 30 years ago I was convinced that this was too shady a site for a healthy pond. I was wrong because the pond was always more popular with the frogs than ours was, despite all my efforts to create the perfect habitat.

I’m really hoping that all the local frogs weren’t hibernating in the pond when it was removed. It’s the first day of spring today and I’m hoping that any returning frogs will hop along to my pond when they find their favourite spot has been destroyed.

chair