Blog Post: The Rat War

The minimum order for guinea fowl chicks was 15 and I already had the aviary from my efforts to raise those tiny quail.  I clicked “BUY” and the order was almost immediately confirmed and sent.  Ellen helped me set up the big Atlas lawn mower box in my rat-proof shop for their brooder.

 I had great hopes to keep the keets warm and safe in the chicken pen until they became interested in flying.

When they arrived, I removed the waterer and the feeder from their box and dumped them into their new pen. They all survived and were soon warm under their red heat lamp with their water and feed back in place. I had 16 lively keets in the enclosed pen, safe from the cats. Every time I checked on them, I counted them.  In a couple days there were only 15.  

One had disappeared. Apparently it had escaped under the big back barn door and was consumed by a predator.  How did it escape?  The cracks under the door were too small.

Then came the morning of the massacre. Most of the keets and of all my remaining chicks were gone and I could only conclude that both the chicks and keets had been consumed by rats.  Some of the half eaten birds had been dragged partway down rat holes. None of the bigger predators like dogs, foxes, and coyotes could possibly get into the pen. I was certain that rats were guilty.  I was ready to declare war on them.

I began cleaning the pen and found that the rats had several more holes under the thin walls.  They could even come down from above by running along the perches I provided for the chickens. Their favorite entry seemed to be through a wall knothole to the water room. I found tunnels under the thick boards of the horses stall that were embedded in the cement floor. They had used a tunnel in the subsoil under the concrete to get through the wood. I figured an 80-lb bag of QUIKRETE High Strength Concrete Mix should be enough to seal all those holes.

When I visited my neighbor we got to talking about how to get rid of rats. She suggested offering the rats a 50-50 blend of peanut butter and baking soda.  Anything to win this war is worth trying! Before blocking the underground and under wall highways, my grandson and I made little balls of the mix and placed one in each tunnel. 

Of course the voracious rats had holes under the old stall/chicken house door too.  We fixed those with old stainless steel scrubbers and used high expanding foam to fill all the rest of the cracks.  I recall Africans blocking rat holes in their mud and wattle huts using mud mixed with broken glass. Maybe our rats would avoid gnawing on stainless steel as the African rats avoided digging out the mud mixture.

Frank, a war veteran of about my age who came to our Sunday evening Bible study, heard about the rat raid.  When proposing to become an ally in my battle against the rats, he submitting to me a manila folder of research complete with rat elimination instructions.  Frankly, I was a little overwhelmed by the details and his immediate initiation of the plan. He even supplied the cages and old plastic milk crates necessary to cover the lethal traps. 

The cages were about the size of shoe-boxes or former milk delivery crates. They had entrances too small for a cat but large enough for rats.  I know Frank enjoyed interaction with his own pet cat and he wanted to be certain our barn cats couldn’t overturn the cages to get at the bait.  

I soon understood that he planned to catch a large number of rats all in one night. He took every precaution to attract the rodents to the nine selected trap sites. He first tried to confirm with black light any glowing evidence of rat activity at each test site.  He used blue rubber gloves to handle everything he had prepared as he set up the feeding stations so the bait could be consumed by unwary rats. I referred to this as a development of new restaurants to attract all the hungry predators into my old barn.  Of course, fleeing the winter, they would be coming in from the fields to the old horse barn too. There were certainly a multitude of rat thruways into my old barn. Frank had mapped out all the test locations on a floor plan of the barn.  

The feeding program began. My grandkids enjoyed helping Frank when he dropped in to check on the progress of his feeding program. I think the idea was to find out which stations were the best at catching rats by checking the quantity of leftovers at each restaurant.  

Frank enjoyed explaining the procedure to my grandkids as they pulled on blue rubber gloves. They lifted off the weights and tipped up the cages to discover how much of the sample bait was left on each unset trap. They came to him with their reports and Frank wrote notes on his map and in his notebook.  Every one of his covered feeding stations were licked clean. How many rats had come?  The rats were winning the war on my farm. Ellen predicted that we would never win against the inexhaustible supply of rats that could come in from the fields.

Frank had thought of everything, including a plan to tie the bait to the trap trigger so that stealing the bait without setting off the trap wouldn’t be possible.

Finally, it was Trap Day! The grandchildren were delighted to help Frank bait the traps. Frank must have set 20 traps to eliminate them that night.

 In the morning, Frank found 18 rats caught and killed, but it was evident that they weren’t all eliminated.  One of the large traps disappeared leaving only a smear of blood at the site where it had been set.  We agreed to try setting out four dishes of rat poison in locations inaccessible to cats and trust that the problem would be solved.  

I had saved two of my new guinea fowl purchased from the hatchery.  They were in my totally enclosed ping-pong aviary outside with my four adult quail.  I decided to move the aviary into the barn.

All the quail eggs that had been scattered around in aviary disappeared.  When my grandson and I moved one end of their enclosure he suddenly exclaimed, “There is a gimungous rat!”

I got an idea of its size from what must have been his own invented adjective.  It had somehow gotten into the aviary!  I had a .22 single shot Remington with some rat load shells that would be effective and my grandson said he saw the rat ran into the hay.

I gave the gun to my grandson. When he shot, the suddenly active hay confirmed that he was in there, but we still didn’t see the rat when all became still.  The second shot may not have been necessary.  We uncovered a large rat about the same size as the ones Frank had caught.

When I started trying to raise quail I hadn’t anticipated this ongoing battle with rats.  I was now to the point that I wondered if there would ever be any free quail to sing out!

Winter would soon be upon us.  The aviary would be totally rat proof in the barn on the cement floor.  Maybe there was still hope that the quail would lay more eggs. The chicken pen should also now be safe if the poison set out after the battle with the rats did any good.

On Monday I enlisted Ellen’s help to manipulate the Aviary up the slope into the barn with planks, rollers and levers.  I closed the barn door and opened the aviary door to free the two big birds.  They cooperated nicely and were free to mingle with the other chickens in the barn. My hopes of success rose again.  The incubator my neighbor loaned me was so well designed that I should be able to get a good percentage of any eggs I found to hatch!  I began looking for eggs.

Since the Rat War was basically finished and poison was set out in shallow bowls under several cages I arrogantly assumed that I had succeeded.  I locked the two grown guinea fowl in the chicken pen along with what was left of my chickens. I figured that the three quail hens should lay quite a few eggs in a week or two so I prepared the incubator to use.

In the morning, I found a ruffled pile of speckled feathers covering a partly eaten dead guinea fowl in the chicken pen. There was only a little bloody evidence on the elevated chicken roost.  This is impossible! I concluded that the bird had been attacked by a weasel or mink.

It was fun to speculate with my friend Jack about what had happened. I borrowed his trap and baited it with the half eaten bird near my burn pile to possibly catch a coon. I doubted a cat would go that far and I could release it, if one did. Jack said a weasel or maybe a mink had gotten in but doubted it could be a raccoon saying, “It was likely rats.”  

They will eat each other or even chew their own leg off if caught in a trap! I guess the pre-trap restaurant service had all the rat relatives looking for a steak-house at the same place.

Now I had one guinea fowl, hoping he would roost way up on top of the wall and survive until spring.  I filled the feeder in the pen on the cement floor. The quail still hadn’t laid any eggs that I could see.  The next morning, I found the quail gone as well as the cracked corn in the feeder all eaten. The rats must have come back. 

I set one of the new traps Frank had given me and the next night the guilty killer came back, took the bacon bait, got caught, and was partially eaten by another hungry animal. 

Is there ever an end to those who would steal, kill, and destroy?  Rats are just predators. They eat to live and in turn are preyed upon by hungry hawks. I sought to protect my quail, but in spite of all my efforts, I’ll never succeed in restoring the joyful sound of quail to this area. Too much has changed from the balance that existed many years ago when quail were abundant and found plenty of places to eat and hide.  

There is absolutely no doubt that God created this beautiful area and that no efforts by man can ever restore what has been lost. Those who would try are doomed to failure.  

God has revealed much of Himself in the glories of what He has created and many try to remove the knowledge of God through teaching evolution.  Man has been given dominion over the earth, however now creation groans under the judgement of God after man chose to follow his own plan for his life. God is the One to fear.

He says in His Word: 

Matt. 10:28 “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

John 10:10 “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

1 Peter 5:8 “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:”

POST SCRIPT

The rats start eating our food.

“Something is opening our jars and eating our dill pickles,”  Ellen told me.  My immediate reaction was to doubt her.  To open a canning jar on the top shelf of the rows of jars in our basement made no sense.  Some jars had been there for years. What could take off the vacuum sealed lids? Her canning process was meticulous and every jar was certainly sealed. 

When she checked she found several opened jars on the top shelf.  If two hadn’t been knocked to the bed-rock basement floor, the raccoon may have eaten more before being discovered. There was no way a raccoon could have gotten access to the jars.  There were cracks between the foundation rocks but none big enough.

Our house was built about 200 years ago and the cement that had been poured against the rock foundation had deteriorated and there were many rat sized holes. My son and grandson mixed up several wheelbarrow loads of concrete and blocked all the holes they could find.  We reset the killer rat traps from our efforts in the barn and caught several.  We added poison to the menu and reset the traps when we found more jars opened.  Some of the poison disappeared.  We caught another rat.  Then all was quiet.

Now I can’t go down into the basement.  “I might fall,” Ellen says.  Can we quit?  As long as we are in this world we need to be alert, for until the Lord comes or takes us home we have an enemy who like a rat prowls around seeking whom he may devour.