Rats
No sign of a rat now for three days.I'm hoping we miight have seen the end of them in the garden.When we lived in Brierfield we had them in the garden and the house. The house then was easy to deal with. I cleaned up the mess which was really foul.They had lived at the back of a cupboard under the sink which we rarely needed to go into.They had robbed a store of Christmas nuts and stored them in a nest in the dining room under a pile of bags in one corner of the room. All we needed to do, apart from cleaning up the mess was to seal off their point of entry to the house which was some missing mortar around the drain pipe from the sink. They were kept out but we still heard them in the walls and saw them crossing over to the bird feeding area, including their clambering onto the feeders and eating the bird food. Little be little I sealed off potential entry points to the walls and set traps which caught a fair number of them,and we were never overrun, unlike some neighbours several doors away.
In the present house we hear them in the roof. When we moved in we found evidence of poison having been laid by previous occucpants and we laid more and set traps. Some poison was taken as was one of the traps which just disappeared from where it was set...presumably somewhere u nder the fibre glass which covers the floor of the loft. We have caught a couple of them, which gives me no joy but the noise continues.
We had a visit from rentokil and their operative said he had been to the house before. There was nothing he could do that we had not already done,unless he were to seal the spaces at the top of the walls. He thought they might be gaining access to thewall voids through a broken drain...but the drains were checkedd andd found to be all intact....but thenoise continues. Fortunately no sign of any ingress into the house, but recently one has been seen in the garden in the bird feeding area. We have lots of feeders and two bird tables and the birds have had all our kitchen scraps in addition to seeds, fatballs, filled coconuts. I have pounds worth of food for them. This beauty has been hellping himself from the bird tables, from the feeders, from the filled coconuts , and a neiighbour has complained to us....so we have stopped feeding the birds and for three days now I have not seen the rat. One on line advice had said ,remove the food which is the reason for them being there and they will move on as they are not territorial. Just now we live in hope as the daily bird count has dropped from around a dozen species daily to about four and it is getting a bit boring.