Vocal Voices

Ratty hasn't been back to see us.
Either he's been downed by the little black cat from number 18 or there's just no food for him here now.

But there does seem to be an enormous number of them about this year. There was an article on the radio today about a man in Pontefract who grows grapes. This year has been an especially good year for them. Or it was, because one morning this week he got up to find that rats had eaten all the grapes on his vines. There were only a few left on the ground. He went out to buy a humane rat trap* but when he got back the rats had been back and they'd had all the ones on the ground as well!

This mirrors the experience of someone just up the hill from us who have an apple tree, who found a rat climbing the tree to get at the fruit.
Why so many this year?

*Why buy a humane trap? What are you going to do with the rat when you've caught it, let it go again?

Possibly the unusual weather has benefited them in some way?

Eek! by the way

We seem to keep coming across them on car parks recently, once at Ikea and then a few weeks ago we cut across Asda car park in Wolverhampton to get to the street where we’d parked and one ran across the pathway just in front of us there.

We had them at our old house just before we moved. They were coming in through a broken air brick in our neighbour’s house and being old houses we had a space under the floorboards downstairs so they were running riot under there, we put poison down but the neighbours didn’t do anything about the air brick so they just kept coming in.
I opened the understairs cupboard one day to get the hoover out and one was staring back at me. I slammed the door shut and there was a lot of screaming and swearing (from me). John had to strip the cupboard out and replace the floorboards because they’d managed to chew through and get in that way.
That was as far as they got in our house but the old couple next door had problems with them getting in.

JoM wrote:I opened the understairs cupboard one day to get the hoover out and one was staring back at me.

Aaarghh!

That’s my “silent scream” emoji

Eeeek

During the summer I saw a neighbour throwing chunks of uncooked chicken at the edge of the copse that surrounds the estate so I challenged her re rats. She responded that she was feeding the foxes and their young kits to help keep the rats down.

I was not convinced or impressed so went to look it up and she is almost right. Foxes prey on rats and mice so helping to keep them, the foxes, in place locally does help.

We see the foxes plenty of times, day and night, but have not seen any rats.

That’s interesting Frank, we’ve never seen any around here yet we seen foxes prowling around regularly.

Going back to our old house, our neighbours Joan and Alan saw one in their hall and also heard them running around under the kitchen cupboards

We were opposite what was once the town hospital and workhouse and at that time parts of it were either being demolished or renovated after lying empty for a long time so the rats were obviously being disturbed and looking for a new home.

We have rats nesting in the nearby riverbank and the overflow attenuation tank at the back of our house. Two doors down keeps hens, and thats one of the things that attracts them into our back gardens, that and the birdseed we put out; I'm very sparing with that nowadays. The river rats unfortunately account for at least 80% of the moorhen hatchlings each year.
We found a dead one tastefully laid out on our patio one morning (presumably a gift from a local feline ) but we've not seen a live one in our back, although our old next-door neighbour saw young ones playing in her back garden.

Where I grew up, in Birmingham, the next-door garden was very overgrown and we had rats coming through into ours. When I was about 7 or 8, me and my mate John decided to catch us one . We upturned a crate in the garden, raised one side up on a wooden peg, attached a long piece of string to the peg, ran the string up to my bedroom window overlooking the scene, baited the trap with cheese, and waited. Within 30 minutes, we'd snared one.

That left us with an interesting dilemma. John went home and had a word with his Dad. His Dad was, by trade, a butcher.
Ratty was rapidly despatched. With a carving knife. We were not allowed to watch.

Ossie, that did make me laugh, but otherwise this thread has me