Rubbish and rats
THERE was much excitement in our garden last night, when the dog went out for a tinkle and spotted a rat.
The rat had obviously been visiting our bird table and was happily munching away when he was confronted with an outraged Lakeland terrier.
“What the heck are you doing in my garden?” Alfie might have said; the rat wasn’t hanging round to answer and scooted off under the shed.
This will mean another weekend of emptying the shed looking for small furry visitors and checking holes in our stone walls.
At the end of the day, I don’t mind the odd rat if it wanders in a cleans up after the birds but I am not keen on them nesting on my property.
You don’t want them nesting nearby because they are prolific breeders, with females having an average of five litters a year, and litters can include a dozen babies.
These little ones are known as pups, nestlings, pinkies or kittens – I don’t think the latter will go down well with the local cat population.
Talking of cats, we know when rats are around by the sudden increase in feline visitors – there is the giant tabby, the black and white youngster and next door’s grouchy old thing who taunts Alfie mercilessly from the top of the wall.
Rats are smaller than cats but can grow just less than a foot long with that long, bald, unpopular tail adding to the length.
They live in loose colonies and dig their own burrows, which are likely to be under your shed or decking, that was built slightly too low for cats to get underneath.
The brown rat has grey-brown fur, a pointed nose, large, bare ears and that tail.
It is bigger than a mouse.
You may mistake it for a water vole, but voles have rounder faces, smaller ears and a furry tail. So water voles are cuter. I have to admit that young rats are quite handsome creatures, having browner fur and being extremely agile.
As they get older they do tend to look a bit less appealing and your main thought will be ‘look at the size of that rat!’
Of course, the really unappealing thing is that rats do carry disease, so it’s not nice to have too many around the place.
A couple of years ago, there was a problem with rats in our village but that seems to have lessened recently.
The thing is, we attract these mammals into our spaces because we are a bit messy.
Rats will feed on anything from fruit and seeds, insects, birds’ eggs and small animals.
They will clean up under your bird table (so you need tidier feeders) and raid your bins and rubbish bags.
Basically, without rats and some of our birds, we would be buried under our own waste, so we have to be grateful in many ways.
Rats happily live alongside humanity but none of us wants a rat as a neighbour or house guest.
The best way to avoid this is to make less mess and make sure your rubbish is safely in the wheelie bin.
The rat is our most flexible creature willing to live under our feet while avoiding us...and our terriers.