I was thinking I’d just mess around today taking it easy chair hopping around the yard with the chickens and then go for an evening kayak down at the river.
Rats
After watching my cam on the computer to see what happened last night after I went to bed I realized I did something wrong last night dealing with the rats.
And that was I took the bad bait can away at 2AM. What I saw was the rats came back to eat a lot after that and only got good stuff instead of the bad stuff as I’d put the good bait can back when I removed the bad bait can.
Thinking on it
That all made me think. Using the baking soda, it was supposed to make the rats blow up or puff up and I’d expect rather bad stuff to happen to the rats more sooner than later. That didn’t happen on the baking soda.
Now what I was thinking is the plaster of Paris would be slower acting, a plug up action would start, so it might take a lot more time to act so it wasn’t a good idea to remove the bad stuff. In other words when they got plugged up they would start to starve and that might take some time so I needed to keep feeding them as they’d be hungry.
I had to remove the bad bait can because in the morning my little chicks would get into it. I doubt it would bother them as chickens have a different type of internal system, but I didn’t want to take the chance.
The solution
I needed a way to keep the bad bait in the pen all the time and I came up with this piece of old bucket I cut off the bottom and put a small hole in the bottom only big enough for the rats to get into and not the chicks.
Here it is. I put the other bait can inside it and will try it out tonight. Of course I expect them to take some time to get used to it.
Here’s the small hole at the bottom for the rats. I figure if the hole isn’t big enough for the larger rats to get into, they can just dig up the ground a bit.
Grounding up seed
Then I got some chicken seed out and ground it up to use in the bad bait tonight.
I did some chair hopping around the yard and some napping too.
The chickens always come around me when I’m sitting in a chair hopping around the yard.
They sure like to dig in the wood chips.
Plans change
Well, evening came around and I didn’t feel like going for that evening kayak trip at the river.
Evening ride
Instead I forced myself to hop on the dirt bike and go for an evening ride up in the hills.
I rode on up and stopped on this trail to clean small rocks off the trail.
I went over to have a look at this downed tree to see if I could move it but no, it will need some cutting on it with a chainsaw.
Sundown
The sun was almost down as I rode around on the hilltops.
I rode around for about an hour and a half and then headed on home for the day.
Setting up the rat bait
I mixed up some bait with the plaster of Paris and set out both the new improved container and the older one they used last night on the right.
The three little rats showed up first and were very cautious and would not eat out of the original can, but they did check out the new container but were very couscous of it.
Big rat shows up
About an hour later the big rat showed up and went to the original container of bad stuff and started feeding. That got all the other rats feeding.
This picture shows the big rat in the bait can on the right and one of the little ones going into the new can because the big rat won’t let it feed on the right so at least they are starting to accept the new bait can as I will have to remove the one on the right again later tonight to keep the chicks out of it.
The lengths we go to, to get rid of these pests that wreak so much havoc. I’ve got my fingers crossed it works. Seems like it shouldn’t take any time at all to see results.
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Header Pictures
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
Oh you dirty rat. Hope this works.
The lengths we go to, to get rid of these pests that wreak so much havoc. I’ve got my fingers crossed it works. Seems like it shouldn’t take any time at all to see results.