Tracking the source of a rat infestation

[Dave N.]

Some readers will remember our rat infestation saga from a couple of months ago:

the rat I whacked behind the fridge was the last one that time around - but our cat still keeps catching them (mostly dead, but one got away while we were away on holiday and settled under the kitchen units again - just trapped that one). We and our neighbours are being left live or dead rats daily and they still keep coming.

I wrote a short request for help in our community newsletter and had a reply from someone two streets away who had an even worse problem than ours and eventually traced it (after 5 years) to a broken sewer that the utility company is expecting to fix in the next few weeks. However, this is probably too far away to be the source of our infestation.

When we had a pest control contractor in a couple of months ago he had a good look round our garden and what he could see of neighbouring properties and concluded that there was no sign of any nests or rat runs on our property. Has anyone in the group any wisdom to offer about finding the root cause of such a large rat population?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Fortunately the rat I whacked behind the fridge was the last one that

Rats occur where there is rat-food.

Access to almost anywhere is no problem to a rat. They may nest under sheds or logs or pretty much anywhere.

Look for someone who has an outside compost that they are throwing food scraps onto.

My wife will keep doing this and wonders why the cats keep killing rats.

You house SHOULD be rodent proof however. Mind you if you have cat flaps, they make good rat flaps as well..

Rats like the poor, are always with us.

They live alongside us mostly invisibly. I only see them here on very rare occasions, but the cats bring in a few, and at this time of year with apples falling off the trees, them and the badgers take the lot .

[Huge]

I live on a farm, and there is a corn store with several thousand tonnes of grain/rape/peas (varies from year to year) in it about 50 yards away, so rat baiting and trapping is a way of life. I bait with Neosorexa purchased from farmrite supplies

in their rat bait stations, and also have a few traps (fasten them down, else wildlife will take the rat corpse and the trap and you'll have to buy new ones....)

Bait;

station;

(be careful - these will take a finger off);

when it gets very bad;

't help you with the source of your infestation, I'm afraid. All you can do is keep killing the little sods.

[Dave N.]

Thanks for the replies so far.

The cat flap is magnetic and we set it to out-only at night. The pest control contractor looked at our house and neighbouring houses as far as he could and concluded that there were no obvious holes above ground that rats could get through or signs of rat activity in our garden.

I got a sewer map of the street from the council - it turns out that the surface water drain goes under our neighbour's house and the sewer runs under the party wall between ours and theirs from the shared sewer at the back of the houses to the street. However, the evidence so far is that our cat is catching rats elsewhere and bringing them back (our neighbours used to feed a hedgehog on the patio until rats started eating the food - they think they saw the rats coming from the far end of the garden).

Our neighbour has just put down a bait box in his garden - if we can find any sign of which way the rats are coming from (apart from in the cat's mouth) we will probably do the same. In the meantime we are using traps and bait trays under the kitchen units, which are inaccessible to the cat. The bait has been eaten sporadically, and the traps had their first success last night (they didn't kill any back in July - this time a sunflower seed/honey mix worked the first time I set them). As far as I know there was only the one rat in our kitchen this time (medium sized, about 30cm end-to-end including tail)

- no doubt we'll find out soon enough whether my guess was correct!

[Huge]

I find peanut butter works well.

[Kevin]

burnt sausages is what the guy on life of grime used, he said it was the bees knees of bait, meat pies is what the nutters used when shooting rats down by the river on another TV program, but you had to remember tie them to a stake first to prevent the rats running of with them before you had time to dispatch them

[RW]

Similar problem here is dealt with using a squirrel trap, a dog biscuit on a cable tie dangling from the top of the wire inside and vanilla essence on the biscuit.

5 this month so far, all released elsewhere near a river, 6 miles away.

I don't kill 'em I just "Rehome" 'em ;-)

[Frank Erskine]

Good on you...

[Dave N.]

Many thanks for the suggestions.

Back to the original request...while we've been doing quite well at trapping and killing the rats when we get them, we still don't have much idea of where such a large number of rats are originating from. I managed to get a rough plan of the sewers in the street from the council - we have one under the party wall between us and next door, but no evidence so far that the rats are coming from under our floors. In fact the sewer doesn't actually go under our kitchen, which is where we have been seeing all the rats, and the pest control contractor is pretty confident that the house and floors are unlikely to be penetrated by rats and therefore it's the cat that's bringing them in from outside (the number of savaged dead rats we are getting points to this as well).

Is there anything else we can do apart from ask the neighbours to look for nests and burrows in their gardens? Or are there any cleverer techniques?

Suggestions welcome!

Dave.