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Unfortunately, the company in Vermont does not do Humane rat removal without rodenticides. So I guess I will have to stick to traps and rodent contraception.
I had my nieces son here last week helping to clean out the Redheads chicken house and I have blocked their doorway with a baby gate. That has discouraged the rats from eating their food. But I need to remove more of the natural cover around the buildings and chicken trailers to help discourage them from nesting there. We shall see ,who wins in the end...wish me luck! The month of August so far has been hot, humid and dry. Right now most of NH is abnormally dry. It means the garden is in need of water daily and the bugs and caterpillars are feasting on my squashes, cukes and tomatoes. Everyday I am killing at least a half dozen horn worms( I have tried feeding them to the chickens, but they won't eat them) and I have given up on the squash bugs. I will need to be more proactive next year to keep the population from exploding. I haven't had to mow my little bit of lawn, but I do need to weed wack around the garden and outside edges of the yard as the weeds are very happy! Zorra is still working on digging out the rats, but I have accepted that my problem is more than traps and disrupting the mating abilities of the rat population. So I have contacted a pest group out of Vermont who claim to do Humane Rodent Removal. I won't do poison as it kills not just the rats, but anything that eats them alive,dying or dead once the rats have ingested the poison. I need hawks, weasels, mink , cats and Bobcats to help with my pest control...so I don't want to kill the predators. I have been lucky not to lose and of my loose chickens this summer to predators, but I think that is simply because the rodent population is out of control, kind of like the year of squirrelmageddon we had a number of years ago. Now it is Ratageddon! Zorra was very tired the other day after she , my friend Heidi and myself had 7 of the 25 young layers escape from their chicken trailer. It was a comedy of errors on my part. I had my lambing/chicken net ready, Zorra would push the chicken out from under the other trailer and as I was trying to catch one layer, the rest would run behind me or through my legs. It was quite comical.....but we finally got all of them back in their trailer. Everyone had worked very hard....but not effectively or efficiently. The problem is that the young birds haven't laid an egg yet, they don't have that sense of where home is , so they hide close by, but won't go back up into the trailer. Unlike the older birds when they are out, they will go back to the safety of the trailer where they lay their eggs . It was pretty funny when we did catch one, we had to free it from the net and the young layers who were still loose would come up and watch us freeing that bird. It always took two of us to free them as these girls are immature and they could get their heads stuck in the netting. If they had been older and more mature they don't tend to stick their heads out where they can get hurt.  |
Mary Will Sussman Archives
December 2025
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