An unpleasant nocturnal experience.

A rat story from Nairobi, Nairobi is home to a giant rat that lives only in the Nairobi river. River you say, yes, a small thin rifffle of dirty water. Boy are these rats big, as big as badger, not quite but close. There were only afew of them and quite rare.

I lived close to the Museum, Ainsworth road and had a flat on the 2nd floor. I used to wake up at night with a start, sensing something on the bed. Checking nothing there.

A while later we moved the fridge and in the motor space found 4 baby rats! The mother rat I chased into the bathroom and it went into the closed space under the bath. a few quick pokes with a sharp stick sorted that out and the baies disposed of.

Now it became clear, in the bedroom was a narrow louvre window and I would on a hot night leave it open, rat climbs in, runs down the bed after jumping onto the bedside locker. Strange as the dog slept on the veranda outside the window.

Now suitably roused I watched and across the road was a line of dustbins and at dusk rats were in and out of those bins.

Time to act, I would wait until the head appeared and pop, down went the rat back in the bin, head shots with a .177 air rifle. I spoke to the owner opposite and he moved his bins so rats were gone. But was'nt over, next I saw a rat climbing up the outside wall with it's back against the down pipe and so I looked on the roof and they were in the box that enclosed the water tank. They were quick to fix and after that we had peace.

back in the UK I started doing a rat shoot on a Fri. night in a chicken farm, using .22 rat shells. £90 a thousand.

We would walk into the space and switch on the lights and it was scurry madness, we all had allocated areas so it was safe. Tally usually in the 20's plus, dumped in the field and all gone by morning. Foxes take them.

We were "ratted" in the loft last year. The local hardware shop sold us these blocks. They have a hole through them so I was able to bang a nail through and into the boarded up flooring so the critters could not drag their dinner around. The hardware man told us the blocks would duff the rats and mummify them so we would not have to put up with the pong you normally get with the corpses. He was right on both counts. Thoroughly recommended.

Rik

If it has not been mentioned, a Fenn trap, placed in the rat run (Path). It doesn't require baiting.

Poison is OK, but the rat chooses where its going to die, and smell.

It won't be a single rat. it will be a whole family.

Good luck....

Bear (Hunter gatherer).

Over several nights my wife and I would hear something large scrabbling about in the house and closer inspection in some hard to get to places revealed rat dropping. I did some research about rats and getting rid of them but didn't want to use traps or poison. The research suggested that rats would go out during the day to scavenge for food and then find somewhere warm and safe during the night. The only thing I needed to do was find out how they were getting into the house and particularly the wall cavity. It turns out that the hole, through which our power cable enters the house had been uncovered when our front drive was relaid and not closed afterwards. We closed this entry point during the day and have never had the rats return.

Clive

Thanks for replies - I'm glad I'm not the only one who has had this problem! There is something about a rat invasion which shouts 'Unclean!' and makes me think I should paint a red cross on my front door. Irrational I suppose (pun only noticed on typing).

Some progress has been made, but it's becoming a bit of a nightmare. One of the cellars has stone 'thralls' (the house was a pub in times of yore) around three walls:

These are shelves made from substantial limestone flags mounted on a random limestone base.

The night after the flood my wife made the first positive sighting of one of the little blighters - it disappeared between the flag stone and the base:

and yes, those black bits on the floor are rat droppings.

I don't know how to tackle this yet - I have about 70 metres of loaded shelving resting on the thralls, built in situ, and it would be a big job to strip it all down, take off the flags and see what's in there.

On a positive note, we've bunged up the holes between cellar and house and (so far) there has been no further evidence of intrusion into living quarters. Maybe they can be gently squeezed out without resort to poison or traps. But I worry about what's going on beneath the thralls. Not Lovecraft stuff I hope (the Rats in the Walls).

Thanks for shared experiences and suggestions,

Robin.

Edited By Robin Graham on 14/01/2022 00:51:14

If you don't like poison (I don't), there is a product called Rat Glue. Its a tray of glue which the rats find irresistible in which they get stuck into. You then have to decide what to do with the creature in the morning. If you leave them there too long, other rats often attack their hapless friend. Its a bit like the old fly papers !

When you say i don't want to kill them just remember all the diseases that they carry .

Rats over time will get through laid concrete, I have seen several places where rats have chewed through the cement. We would flood with a hosepipe to flush them out,

The nextime we visited, the holes in the concrete were active again. If cementing the holes bung some wire mesh in as far as it will go and then cement.

Where I worked many year's ago, we had a professional rat catcher. He told me that a rat can easily chew through 12 inches of concrete and the growth rate of their teeth is phenomenal. Filling a rat hole with a bit of cement won't deter it, if it's the usual place it gains access to food, which is usually it's prime objective.

They don't like smashed beer bottles down their hole, they just make another one (Hole not beer bottle).

Robin,

Great Horror story!

Martin

My wife used to volunteer at a cat sanctuary. The rats made a tunnel that ended at the pit inside the large cage that the cats used a s a toilet!

One cat wee'd down the hole No more visitors!

Possibly scattering some cat wee around the cellar would do the same. But the smell!

Some cats are frantic rat killers, as long as they don't get injured by the rats in a fight..

Howard

Thankfully not quite as dramatic as Clive's rat experiences but still on the subject of animal pests, About 20 years ago my wife and I spent a fortnight in a ground floor chalet in Gran Canaria and every evening when we came home and opened the door half a dozen or more cockroaches were scuttling around the floor, to dispatch them I kept the door mat rolled up ready and quickly whacked them all and kicked the bodies out onto the patio, every morning when I went out they were gone so I just assumed I hadn't hit them hard enough and they had recovered, but one morning I got up a bit earlier and went out and saw what was happening, there were two long lines of ants, one led to the cockroach bodies where they were dismantling them, the other line of ants carrying bits of legs, wings and bodies led into the garden area to their nest, nothing was left at all, wish I could have filmed it.

John

My youngest daughter lives not far from us in the same village, she is complaining of nocturnal visitors in her kitchen cupboards, they gnaw through the backboards and help themselves to crisps, biscuits and cereals, she is convinced that they are mice, I have other thoughts. Our village is home to a waste transfer station that receives all the domestic waste from the local area which includes Eastbourne, since they moved the transfer station here the population of rats locally has exploded, not unusual to see groups of rats crossing the roads during broad daylight. Daughter says she can hear her visitors scurrying around in the wall cavities! She has six dogs and five cats, yes she is bonkers where animals are concerned, you would expect the cats to hunt down the intruders but they are too well fed to bother. Whatever bait she puts on traps is gone next day and the traps haven’t been sprung so obviously the rodents, whoever they are, are intelligent enough not to get caught. She won’t use poison because of inadvertently poisoning her own animals and of course the stink when they crawl away to die. She is on a mission to close off any holes in the outside walls but her house was built between the wars and has a lot of likely entry points.
In respect of my workshop when I built it I tried to make it as mouse proof as possible, door is close fitting and has a brush strip fitted across the base and draught proofing seals around the periphery, windows are double glazed units which were mis-sizes from local glazing firm picked up for a pittance. Power supply enters via a duct in the floor which comes from an underground chamber that houses my koi pond filter so an obvious entry route for intruders, have packed copious amount of steel wool around the cables in the duct and so far the defences haven’t been breached. Our garden is a bit of a wildlife haven with a feeding station for birds so an attraction for rodents, our female cat is an avid hunter, spending most of the day patrolling looking for mice and regularly brings home her trophies through the cat flap and let’s them go in our lounge, I then catch them and return them to the garden so they can return to their nests and the cycle starts over again.
As a youngster I was brought up in what was then Malaya, we lived in Kuala Lumpur, back in the fifties the city embarked on a programme of upgrading certain areas of the city’s sewer system, once they disturbed the system there was a plague of rats, and these were a bit like Clive’s rats, they were big, some about the size of cats, they were totally unfazed by people and used to move around in broad daylight and it was not uncommon to see them wander in and out of the shops and nobody took any notice of them. To anybody who has a rat or mice problem I wish them luck in solving it. Dave W

Further to my posting above, when we lived in Malaya we had a mongoose that took up residence in our roof space, we didn’t mind him being there because he would make sure we didn’t have a rat problem. Another bonus from his residency was that we had cobras that nested in various areas of the garden and he kept them in check. We also had a lot of mynah birds that visited the garden, we bordered onto virgin jungle, it seemed that the mongoose also had a taste for mynah birds, after he had taken a few of them the mynah birds took it out on our cat and every time he went outside the birds mobbed him and he became afraid to venture out during daylight. Dave W

Thanks for further advice and anecdotes. To wind this up (I hope) I heard a piercing shriek from the cellars the other day - it was from my wife who had been poking around in search of further evidences. She'd uncovered a nest in the "old tarpaulins, bits of rope and other cr*p I'm to tight to throw away - you never know when it might come in useful" corner of the workshop. Complete with waterlogged ex-rat. Presumably it had gone to meet its maker during or shortly after the deluge.

Since then, and after having plugged holes with a mixture of cement and stainless steel swarf (like razor wire) which I happened to have to hand, there have been no further incursions into the house or any evidences of nefarious activity in the cellars. So maybe it was just the one rat. Touch wood!

A good thing that has come out of this is a resolve to clear out the workshop. Does anyone want 7kg of of miscellaneous wood screws, 10 feet of rusty cast iron pipe (very retro) , six broken clocks, some 1970's speakers, a water bath which only needs some blown triacs replacing, a potentially lethal tube furnace driven by a transformer with naked windings etc etc.

No, I thought not.

Robin

Edited By Robin Graham on 22/01/2022 03:00:23

Edited By Robin Graham on 22/01/2022 03:01:27

Edited By Robin Graham on 22/01/2022 03:05:59

My dog, an Aireale bitch cannot abide any living thing in her garden, she patrols diligently dawn to dusk.Squirrels, birds and mice. We have field mice that live in the Cotonaster hedging and sometimes I hear the high pitched yelping that indicates she has cornered a mouse. I go out with the torch to search the hiding place and the mice are quick. So far she has caught 2 mice, she crunches them and drops them leaving me to pick up and dispose.

Many years ago when in our old house we had suspended wooden floors. Rats used nibble a hole from underneath in the corner between the floorboard and the skirting board. One particularly troublesome and high IQ rat evaded traps, poison, Dak (remember that?) etc, and always timed his arrival just as I was falling asleep. I endured this for a few nights. I figured that smart as the rat was, humans should be able to win this particular intellectual contest.

The solution proved to be simple in the end. I got a length of twin-core cable, separated the two strands and fixed one to each side of the hole in a way that ensured contact for anything that tried to pass between them. I fitted a 5amp fuse to the plug and switched it on.

A loud squeal some short time after lights out decided the contest. My beauty sleep was restored!

I used to live couple of hundred yards from a rubbish transfer station in Brighton and had a real hunter cat who used to almost live there. Staff told me she was often seen there - had address collar. One day she brought home a trophy - biggest rat I've ever seen, laying still - feigned death? She hooked a claw in its rear end twirled it round and round, building up speed the let go. Rats head hit garden wall. End. When I thought it safe, I laid newspaper over the corpse to pick it up and dump in dustbin. Absolutely enormous rat, nearly as big as it's killer.

I have heard of a method of killing the but don't know if it's true or would work with family members. Leave pile of grain each end of barn every day. Each day, reduce quantity of both piles and move them a bit closer, finally only one insufficient pile in the middle, so they kill each other for what's left.