Rats

In a couple of weeks, we will see the arrival of 51 new laying chicks (you will hear more about that in future posts). In preparation for the birds, we have had to eliminate rats from the barn. They are the worst we have ever had. You can occasionally walk into the barn and see them scurrying to hide. This has been an obsession for our dog Amber. This influx in the rat population started when we harvested the turkeys and left the unused turkey feed in the barn and didn’t take the time to do anything about it. We finally pulled the remaining feed out, and Greg made and distributed several bait stations in each of the barn stalls. We have now learned that One-Bite works great for mice but not so much for rats. We then went to old school and set up 6 rat traps. They must have been hungry as they were scrounging looking for anything to keep themselves alive.

If you recall, we wrote a previous post on nuisance creatures, and the only way to kill rats was through traps. They do not like the poison we put out for the mice.

With a pallet of chicken grower food coming in preparation for the new chicks, these rats had to go! If not, they will eat through a bag of food in less than a month and immediately start reproducing. They make a real mess eating holes into every feed bag, building nests in the hay/straw, and tunneling underground. 

We started setting about 6 traps a month ago to eliminate them. In the first week or so, we got several rats quickly using peanut butter as bait. Then the action died down, so we switched to Oreo cookies (Peyton usually only eats the frosting, so we had a container of just chocolate cookies). With that, we got several more, but again they got wise to the cookies. So, now we are alternating between the two baits, trying to catch all the rats before the feed comes.

In about a month, we have killed over twenty rats. We think we have gotten most of them. Most averaging about the six inches long and three inches in diameter. One disturbing discovery we found the first day following the initial setting of traps was that they are so incredibly hungry, the rats ate nearly 100% of their dead friend that had been caught the same night. The other rats ate the entire insides and every morsel of meat even off the legs. The skin looked like it was ready for tanning. Crazy!

Hopefully, with these dirty hungry creatures being eliminated, we will not have any issues this spring with the baby chicks or their food disappearing.