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Old October 15, 2017   #7
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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Yes indeed. Deluxe Ratisson Hotel I made. Warm as toast and riddled with food. And right near to my house as well.
Nice thought Miss S, I did worry 'where will they run to', but there is no way I'm letting them set in that pile any longer or try to 'reduce their numbers' myself. I am not cut out for the business of killing vermin or of instigating a long and endless war between me and them. As the fellow who gave me the advice about the tarp, so happens to be still engaged in a decades long war with the rats. If he expected a nest in the pile he certainly didn't say so, or if he has seen such nests it may not have occurred to him that it is a primo way to create a rat problem and a bad practice for that reason.
In any case it is true, there are fat country rats around wherever there's any serious attempt to grow food. The closer you are to water, the better they like it. There are plenty of ditches and marshes in the area, a river also, but these features are far enough from my house to make it less appealing as a place to nest. Or so I thought.
There has been a huge amount of construction on the hillside above the river, and a swath of forest now is housing. Dunno if that displaced some country rats or attracted them.

I took a long pole and poked and broke away the holes in the pile and have now seen a total of ten animals leaving the pile. The smallest were no bigger than mice, the largest one the size of a cat and a medium brown color while all the lesser and small sized ones were grey.
I will have to be on my game and make sure I have routed them out of the area and not taking up residence somewhere else on my property.
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