Rodent Bait Station Construction and Baking Soda and Plaster of Paris Doesn’t Kill Rats

Sunday March 5, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Showers today

We’ve been having showers lately and this morning we had some hail, but it melted right away.

Redwood mulch for the chickens

After the main showers slowed down I got the wheelbarrow out. I went over to my brother’s place to pick up some redwood  mulch for the chicken pen.

I put two loads of the mulch in the chicken’s pen and will let them spread it out.

This cloud went in front of the sun and shortly we got another shower for about ten minutes.

Nancy from comments asked about the rodent stations I made

I’ve watched the rats on a cam that’s connected to my computer for several months to see what they did and how the things I used to try and catch them worked out. Traps weren’t very effective as they only would catch a few of the not so smart rats, which were mostly the younger ones. The older ones wouldn’t touch the traps.

Big green cubes don’t work either

I tried the big green cubes but the rats wouldn’t touch them, until I broke them up. It seems they are born knowing about the blocks.

I put bait in closed containers and they wouldn’t go into them, another thing they must be born knowing about.

Better bait

Eventually, I got some bait in pellets and eventually found some a bit cheaper that were balls.

My bait station

What I found to work was something like this. I put this together with parts I had around the place. You can adapt whatever you have to do the same thing. I’ll tell you what and why I did what I did, so just adapt what you have from there. This one has cleaned up most of the rats in this area and now only gets one feeding once in awhile.

Here’s a close up of the rodent bait station.

I had this big plant container base laying around. It was about twenty inches across and I used it for a lid to keep water off the bait.

Here’s a shot with the lid removed.

I have chickens, so I used 1×2 inch welded wire, to keep long necked chickens out of it. It’s also easy to work with. I could of  make this wider and it would do the same thing, but I’d need a larger lid. My wire was about 18 inches high.

Those wire holes are too small for the larger rats, so I cut a small door on one side of the bottom. This hole is really too big. It should be smaller, around 4×4 or so. I always put the entrance up near a fence or something that chickens won’t get near that entrance.

Bait container

The plastic bait can is the bottom of a plastic paint can I cut off. Most anything will work. The part of a bucket is used to lift the bait can up higher to the lid to help keep the rain water from blowing in the sides and it gives the rats a good perch to feed, although they’d just jump into the bait can to feed anyway. A block of wood would work fine for this. You can see the cheaper green balls I’ve been using for bait. There’s only a few balls in there because most of the rats are gone and this way I know there is another rat feeding when the balls are gone. I had a few more in there, but a rat ate them last night.

Welded wire

This is the roll of wire I used, just because I had it. It costs well over a 100 bucks for this.

Cheaper wire

This green welded wire would work just fine. It has 3×3 inch holes. You can get this in shorter and smaller rolls and doesn’t cost a lot. The holes are likely big enough to be entrances too. This might be in the garden department?

Sum up

Those are the basic principles for this bait station. The main thing is this is not a closed thing like a trap, or something that looks like a wire box trap. If you have a safe closed place, you can just put a bowl out and do much better than the closed containers they sell to hold the bait and don’t use the green blocks. I will likely work on making a video of this some time soon.

Baking soda and plaster of Paris doesn’t kill rats

I tried Baking soda and then Plaster of Paris and they do not work.  They ate a lot of it but it didn’t seem to bother them. I tried those baits for a couple months and just fed them well.

They say rats can’t fart or burp and the baking soda is supposed to cause them to bloat. If that were so, it should of killed them right away and the Plaster of Paris is supposed to clog them up which it did not.

Plum blossoms

Despite the rains, the plum blossoms are still coming on strong.

Nice day.