NFR I saw a rat in my yard.

[Jim in Anacortes]

Just a quick glimpse of him was all it took for me to go full on "Daniel Boone" on his ass. I ordered a "live trap" online, set it up and got one the first night. Sadly, the little guy did not survive the night and was dead in the morning. Apparently we have "brown" rats and "black" rats (both are known by other names). I think he was a "black" rat from the photos. My neighbor has a "compost pile" that is probably not helping, but I'm on a mission to nip this in the bud. I did not get the regular rat traps as I was worried about squirrels and other animals....and I like letting them go better than dumping the body in the garbage. It's a bummer that I've got rats around but ,to be honest, it's kind of fun being a trapper.

 

[PhilR]

Yeah, trapping is fun until you realize you’re bailing against the tide. For me it’s neighbors with compost and poorly managed fruit trees. I climbed the ladder from traps, to Home Depot bait stations, to hiring an exterminator to poison them. Problem solved.

Good luck!

 

[Dloy]

I don’t trust exterminators. We hired one for an ant problem and I’m confident they baited them with sugar water so the problem got worse, so that we would sign up for a greater contract. Plus, they insisted on trying the least invasive measures first. Would have taken a year. I fired them and had the problem fixed in a week. Then they tried to force payment on an unfulfilled contract. I filed a complaint with consumer reports and they finally backed down after quite a while. Had a similar problem with rat exterminators and simply didn’t rehire them. They left the commercial bait stations though, so I bought the (secret) key and bait on line and do it myself.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to rant.

 

[Matt B]

I don’t trust exterminators. We hired one for an ant problem and I’m confident they baited them with sugar water so the problem got worse, so that we would sign up for a greater contract. Plus, they insisted on trying the least invasive measures first. Would have taken a year. I fired them and had the problem fixed in a week. Then they tried to force payment on an unfulfilled contract. I filed a complaint with consumer reports and they finally backed down after quite a while. Had a similar problem with rat exterminators and simply didn’t rehire them. They left the commercial bait stations though, so I bought the (secret) key and bait on line and do it myself.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to rant.

I know an exterminator down South, when he gets the call for “I saw a snake in my house!” he always shows up and always has a captive snake or two. Guaranteed he can produce a snake to show and say, “Look, I caught a snake, all good here. That’ll be $250.”

 

[albula]

I live near an abandoned mill site on the water that has habitat and food galore for rats. No way to wipe out that population that does stray into our neighborhood. Just got to make sure that there are no access points in the house and keep some bait traps outside around it. I have a service that comes and checks every 4 months and frankly that is the most effective way to deal with an ever present threat. Money well spent and they check for any other pests. I used to try to do it myself but have become convinced if you want things done right hire a pro.

 

[Russell]

"but ,to be honest, it's kind of fun being a trapper."

My kid used to love putting out the have a heart trap and trapping squirrels and the occasional racoon. We bought him hair coloring spray in different colors and he would color the squirrels red blue green purple before he let them go. Then we would see if we captured them again and where they were in the neighborhood. The neighbors thought we were crazy and would laugh at the purple squirrel running down the fence line.
The pissed off racoon at three in the morning in the tree wasn't as fun.

For rats I like a headlamp, a half rack of beer and a pellet gun. Great entertainment.

 

[Pescaphile]

I kept our boat in the marina in Quilcene from Sept '20 until July 22. An older gentlemen lived there on his boat in the marina but left on short notice aorund the beginning of 2021 to go care for his son out of state after the son fell ill. By fall, I noticed an occasional dropping on my boat's deck and by X-mas they were common. The rats had moved into that guy's boat and we're having a party with all the food (he had a couple of cats) he'd just left.

I was doing work on the inside of my boat and had removed all food, clothes and pretty much everything except some tools and sundry supplies for my work. I set traps on deck and caught either has a caught a rats or had a sprung trap pretty much every time I showed up to work (every other day). Once, when I didn't show for a few days I found I'd caught a rat only to have had another cannibalize its carcass. It seemed like the rate I caught rats slowed near the end, but the size of them increased. I hypothesized that food was getting scarce, and only the stronger were surviving. I must've caught 35-40 rats between Jan 1 and the first of April when they finally seemed to move on. Most them I caught with Nutella but peanut butter got some and bacon to a lesser extent (I didn't use it but once or twice).

I never got any help from management despite letting them know several times there was a rat problem. We pointed the bow north to greener pastures. I was sure happy to leave that place.

We also had rat problems at home, when new neighbors would leave a big dish of dog food outdoors for the racoons plus peanuts for the squirrels. We caught three in traps there, but our fifteen year (at the time) old cat, Archie, did the heavy lifting and killed a dozen in a little more than a year. Archie was a still quite the killer, he also got two smaller rabbits and about ten mice that I know of during the same period. He'd eat the bunnies and usually the mice but wouldn't consume a bit of the rats.

 

[Dloy]

…”he would color the squirrels red blue green purple before he let them go.”
Decades ago I had cats, and a neighborhood Tom kept getting into the back porch, pissing and eating their food. I had an old (full) bottle of Hai Karate (a grooms gift). I trapped the Tom and managed to pour the whole bottle on him. He was spitting angry but I never saw him again.

 

[FinLuver]

Rats will sacrifice their youngins’ to test the waters before the adults will venture out. They are smart little bastards.

Keep trappin’ till you trap no more.

I heard of a bait that they take back to their dens. They eat it and get real thirsty…they leave in search of water and die off…outside your place/walls…so no smell.

Where there’s one you may have 50 or more.

The black ones have nice fur…skin ‘em with a hazmat suit on, clean, stretch, and dry the hide for tyin’

 

[Lue Taylor]

You go to Hell for lying oops! I forgot this a flyfishing forum which means you lie about what you catch

 

[PhilR]

"but ,to be honest, it's kind of fun being a trapper."

My kid used to love putting out the have a heart trap and trapping squirrels and the occasional racoon. We bought him hair coloring spray in different colors and he would color the squirrels red blue green purple before he let them go. Then we would see if we captured them again and where they were in the neighborhood. The neighbors thought we were crazy and would laugh at the purple squirrel running down the fence line.
The pissed off racoon at three in the morning in the tree wasn't as fun.

For rats I like a headlamp, a half rack of beer and a pellet gun. Great entertainment.

Ah, the old mark/recapture study to estimate population size.

 

[MT_Flyfisher]

"but ,to be honest, it's kind of fun being a trapper."

My kid used to love putting out the have a heart trap and trapping squirrels and the occasional racoon. We bought him hair coloring spray in different colors and he would color the squirrels red blue green purple before he let them go. Then we would see if we captured them again and where they were in the neighborhood. The neighbors thought we were crazy and would laugh at the purple squirrel running down the fence line.
The pissed off racoon at three in the morning in the tree wasn't as fun.

For rats I like a headlamp, a half rack of beer and a pellet gun. Great entertainment.

I have a Havahart trap set up in my backyard right now to catch squirrels. I bait it with a combination of Skippy extra crunchy peanut butter and fresh roasted peanuts. Although I’ve caught lots of squirrels in it, I haven’t gotten any the past several days since it seems that birds have found their way in it, and they can eat all of the peanuts and some of the peanut butter and get out without tripping the trap door closed.

When I first started trapping squirrels several years back I took them several miles outside town and released them alive in the woods, but I never seemed to notice that there were fewer squirrels around my property. That’s when a friend told me that squirrels will return to their original home turf, and he suggested painting their tails to see if the squirrels that I had released were returning.

I never did spray paint them but I read a study posted on the internet that claimed squirrels in their study returned as much as 20 miles to their original homes after they had been trapped, tagged and released. There is no way I was going to spend the time and money to take a lousy squirrel more than 20 miles to release it, so since then I’ve been trying to teach my trapped squirrels how to swim, under water. So far none have succeeded.

Incidentally, Havahart traps are a division of the Woodstream Corporation, which is headquartered in Lancaster, PA, just a few miles from my home in SE PA. One of Woodstream‘s divisions is Victor, a well known mouse or rat trap. Not as well known though is that Woodstream Corporation once owned Fenwick, maker of popular fiberglass fly rods in the 1970’s. With the introduction and increased popularity of graphite fly rods I believe Woodstream either stopped making, or sold, Fenwick sometime in the 1980’s.

 

[Merle]

When I first started trapping squirrels several years back I took them several miles outside town and released them alive in the woods, but I never seemed to notice that there were fewer squirrels around my property. That’s when a friend told me that squirrels will return to their original home turf, and he suggested painting their tails to see if the squirrels that I had released were returning.

I never did spray paint them but I read a study posted on the internet that claimed squirrels in their study returned as much as 20 miles to their original homes after they had been trapped, tagged and released. There is no way I was going to spend the time and money to take a lousy squirrel more than 20 miles to release it, so since then I’ve been trying to teach my trapped squirrels how to swim, under water. So far none have succeeded.

The other issue with humanely releasing them back into the wild at a different location, while done with the best of intentions from kind hearted people, is that if they don't immediately leave the new area the existing squirrels there will fight and kill them. They may be cute but they're pretty mean to each other, and not about to share good territory with new interlopers.

 

[Salmo_g]

Rats evoke a negative visceral reaction from me. I wouldn't hesitate to opt for the nuclear option if it were available.

 

[RCF]

Unfortunately you are highly likely to have more than 1 rat:

"A female rat typically births six litters a year consisting of up to 12 rat pups, although 5-10 pups are more common. Rats reach sexual maturity after nine weeks, meaning that a population can swell from two rats to around 1,250 in one year, with the potential to grow exponentially."

 

[Jim in Anacortes]

I assume there are more rats but I have been unable to catch any more. I'll try some different bait tonight. My buddy once had a rat on his sailboat. He poisoned it and that makes them thirsty, so the rat chewed a hole in a rubber hose to get to some water. The rat sank his boat. The salvage diver came up and threw the drowned rat onto the dock. Lesson learned.

 

[Pescaphile]

I assume there are more rats but I have been unable to catch any more. I'll try some different bait tonight. My buddy once had a rat on his sailboat. He poisoned it and that makes them thirsty, so the rat chewed a hole in a rubber hose to get to some water. The rat sank his boat. The salvage diver came up and threw the drowned rat onto the dock. Lesson learned.

They'll also gnaw on the insulation on wiring which leads to other problems. I had that in the back of my mind the whole way to Alaska last summer, thinking I might have a problem at a most inopportune time. I hadn't heard about problems with them chewing through hoses but I'm not surprised.

 

[Stimson]

I bought my current house 4 years ago. It came with its own cat. P.O. didn't want to take it with them. I have since come to realize I have a serial killer mouser cat. Rats, moles, snakes, lizards, birds, rabbits, squirrels, even wasps, bees, and butterflies. If it moves and he can catch it he'll kill it and bring it up onto the deck to show me. Not so much these days on the bees and wasps because he actually caught and ate a bee which then stung him. His face swelled up for a couple days, then he was back at it. Hell I live in the country and have zero pest issues. The only thing I get to do is clean up the daily carnage.
My recommendation- skip the exterminator and add mouser cats until the problem is under control. I have 1 cat, I live on 7+ acres, and have zero pest issues.

 

[RCF]

Serial killer mouser cats work great. Not all cats are one of those though. We have had a couple of serial killer mouser cats over the years. As you have found out they like to leave the offerings at the door. They like to share their bounty with the 'master' who takes great care of them. Probably the worst critter left at the door was a mountain beaver. I kid you not...

 

[charles sullivan]

If they have rats in the compost, it is tough. It provides warmth and food. I do not compost anymore due to rats. Your neighbor may need at least to get his ratios correct, turn it and make sure the moisture levels are correct. This will speed up the decomposition. Composting is controlled decomposition, not rotting of food. When done correctly it will get hella hot and not attract rats and other vectors as much. It should break down quickly. Composting is not just having a pile of garbage decomposing.

The thing to do is to be damn sure that your house is rat proof. Steel wool is your friend. use it in any hold that you can fit it in.

Rats will always want to move while being next to a wall. They do not want to be out in the open. Place any traps accordingly. In fact, you may not have to bait them.

Rats are incontinent. They piss continually. Their urine shows up in the dark if you use a black light. In building with rats it will show up all along the walls.