Well the summer is upon us and the fruit trees that like my neighbor’s back fence line are full of fruit and rats. I’ve previously reported on this situation, but my neighbor, a very gentle elderly lady – loves growing food in her garden. She also raises chickens, and thanks to a green belt between our neighborhood and the trailer park a block over, and the bike trail that comes through, we have a lot of green and wet areas as well as food sources I can’t control that attract packs of roof rats.

When the fruit runs out the rats start looking for places to shelter and I want to make sure that it is not in my yard or outbuilding. So, we are starting early with the A24 automatic trap and some claw traps back on the fence line which took out a net of 25 rats last year.

This year I had noticed that the white nectarine tree is growing into my yard. It’s going to supply me with probably 2 dozen nectarines but I am already seeing munched fruit and pits in the area behind the outbuilding.

I restocked the A24 trap, this is a fancy co2 powered trap that can reset itself over and over again killing up to 25 rats unmonitored. It uses a plastic plunger that is fired at a high rate of speed and conks them on the noggin. That’s a technical term.

I also put out some sunflower seeds into my claw traps but while those were munched the trap did not catch anything. I need to make sure to top them with peanut butter.

The A24 trap has Bluetooth to alert me of snaps but it never seems to notify me, probably because the trap is behind my building and the signal can’t reach me. I went out to check the traps this morning and found a dead one not far from the A24. Once I got close to it, it alerted me that it struck once at about 9:20 PM.

It seems this one was able to exit the trap but didn’t make it far before keeling over, which is interesting because sometimes I get an alert that a strike happened but there is no rat to be found. I’m guessing they may run back through the other side of the fence but they must not make it very far.

Each female rat can produce like 70 more rats. They live in little neighborhoods so while I have a neighborhood of rats living near me, they are connected to other groups. Last year it seemed as if I was able to wipe out the group living in my neighbor’s yard but due to the fact that I can’t set up traps everywhere in the area – I’m unable to eradicate them completely and will have to persistently trap.

Another option that’s possible is to put up an owl box, as just one pair of owls moving in should help the entire neighborhood control the rat population. They can eat hundreds of rats per year, which would potentially put a dent in my block’s rat problem.