Here’s how it starts. First there is the dream of the micro-farm, then there are the painstaking plans to realize that dream – yeah, right – then comes the wild-bird buffet, the bees, the plants in the garden, and the chickens. Along with the assembly of things-we’re-gonna-grow comes a host of deer, voles, moles, hawks, eagles, coyotes, raccoons, cougars, and bears who are more than happy to gobble every last morsel leaving no more than the prickly bits and some droppings as a calling card. But underneath this battle for who gets to eat what is another layer of the micro-farm economy – sort of like Greece and Spain are to Europe – almost unseen and willing to destroy everything in the quest for a free lunch.
To wit, the rats.
The first sighting came on a sunny afternoon out on the compost pile. We are avid composters, to say the least. If it has any type of plant material in it, it gets composted. We are so obsessed with composting that we have stopped recycling cardboard in favor of composting it. Everything that can be composted – food scraps, random bits of paper, yard waste, even old cotton clothes – gets tossed onto the pile and is consigned to the worms. As the strata build up the lower levels are compressed, giving them enough structural integrity to be tunneled through. Out of one of these tunnels issued our first rat.
It was a large-ish rat. Okay, the thing was fucking enormous. Gigantic. Huge. It was the biggest rat I had ever seen and, coming from New York City, I’ve seen some big rats. It would poke out of the tunnel, grab some leftover food, and rush back in. Then it would do it again and again. And again.
“Whew, at least it’s way far away on the compost pile.”
Such is the nature of denial.
The way it works is as follows: The garden goes in, the moles dig their tunnels to nibble on the tasty roots, the plants die and the tunnels are abandoned. The voles move in and widen the tunnels. Lastly come the rats and they sit – their beady, black eyes surveying the area – and wait.
The first sign that we had a problem was that something that shouldn’t have been in a bird feeder, namely nothing, was. I’ll wait a second here because I kind of like that sentence and think you should appreciate the construction. Okay, enough of that. The feeder in question is a wire basket strapped to a pole about two feet off the ground. The basket is designed to hold a cup or two of sunflower seeds and birds that are too weak, crippled, or lazy to fly up to the real feeders, can just hop up and eat their fill. They crack the shells, eat the seeds, and, eventually, the basket is filled with empty husks. One morning the basket was empty, like it had been swept clean with a Shop-Vac, and tilted at an alarming angle.
“Oh look,” I said in my ignorance. “We must have had a deer on the patio.” I couldn’t envision anything smaller than that having the ability to torque the basket out of alignment. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
My illusion was bolstered by the logic that if the deer were competing with the birds for seeds, then our garden was safe. We did find deer tracks leading in the general direction of the patio, helping to entrench my thinking; thinking that would soon be sliced to bits by the glinting blade of Occam’s razor.
A couple of days later – with another tipped and empty seed feeder intervening – I was standing at the kitchen window regarding the virtual wall of bird feeders when a bush started shaking, a gray shape concealed by its leaves.
“Wow! That’s a funny looking bird.”
I looked more closely.
“Oops.”
Damn! We had an infestation, i.e. more than zero rats. The rat found the patio. It was climbing up the thin branches of the bush trying to bypass the seed tray and get to the more nutritious and delicious suet feeder. Fortunately, the branches were too frail and it was unable to gain enough height to make the jump. I banged on the window and it dropped to the ground and dashed away.
It seems that, at the micro-farm, the rat was waiting for something to fall from one of the eighty-seven (at last count) bird feeders hanging around the patio. Birds are notoriously messy eaters, spilling food ten or twenty times more often than actually eating it. The missed morsels shower onto the concrete like manna from heaven, from the rat’s point of view, and it nibbles up the crumbs like some furry little Dirt Devil with an anomalously short power cord.
The upside of this is that the patio’s surface is kept cleaner than the operating room at most major hospitals – not that that’s saying much – and we don’t have to sweep the tasty tidbits up. But rats are rats and we really don’t feel like sitting outside enjoying dinner al fresco and worrying about some sleek-pelted Hoover scouring the floor next to our feet.
Nothing more happened for several days until we heard a gentle tapping on the back door. I opened to door and there was the rat, looking at me and pointing up to a bird feeder as if to say don’t you think this feeder is getting a bit low?Then it dashed off into the bushes. Over the next hour or so it made several dozen excursions onto the patio searching for seeds and such. It always came out of the same bush, and always returned the way it came.
“Oh. That’s the bush with the big hole under it. I wonder if that’s where the rat lives,” said Captain Obvious.
Thus began the quest for a trap. Rat traps have evolved over the past decades. There are Hav-a-Heart live traps for those who wish to do no harm to Nature’s creatures or who just want a live rat to let loose in the nasty neighbor’s yard. There are box traps where the rat checks in but, thanks to a fast acting neurotoxin, doesn’t check out. There are slower acting poisoned baits which allow the rat to take some food back to its struggling young where everybody develops a bleeding stomach and dies. There are glue traps, like a micro-La Brea tar pit, to hold the rat in a tenacious adhesive while it slowly dies of starvation and dehydration. Lastly, there is the tried-and-true snap trap, where a spring loaded wire whacks the rat with sufficient force to cause rapid, if not exactly instantaneous, death.
There are those among you who, after being subjected to the organic-micro-farming-free-range-grass-fed-natural-beekeeping-tree-hugging-socialist-kumbaya-my-lord-holistic-worldview claptrap I propagandize in this blog, may have expected me to take the all-creatures-great-and-small route and spring for the Hav-a-Heart trap and the “relocation” solution for our rat problem. Nope. The rat will eventually return to the buffet and resume the feast. Sorry, the rat must die. But I am not willing to take this creature’s death less seriously than I should and make it bleed out slowly or die in panic and frustration stuck in glue. Besides, all of the poison options do nothing but transfer the toxins from the box into a food chain upon which I sit. Sounds kind of stupid to me. In the end, it was the snap trap that won out.
I went down to Ace Hardware and got a trap. I baited it with suet (seemingly our rat’s favorite food), set the spring, and put it under a box with a little door cut in the side. The box is to prevent any misguided birds from accidentally setting the trap off. Eventually the trap tripped and I found an empty box, a trap with no bait, and nothing dead. I upped the ante.
In the old days I always used bacon as bait so I went down to Safeway, bought some, and, after breakfast, reset the trap. With the new bait I hoped to trick the wily rodent with some genuine smoke-house flavor. Everything got reassembled, a process which included nearly severing two fingers with my ham-handed – no pun intended – manipulation of the hair-trigger mechanism, and I waited. Two more days went by with no results and then, there it was: a dead rat in the bushes three feet away from the trap.
It had tripped the trap but still managed to drag itself out before it died. I honored its death and set its corpse out in the west forty (square yards) to serve as food for the local scavengers, thereby maintaining the circle of life. Sure enough, a few hours later the crows started cawing like mad as the resident scavenger swept onto the meadow. A majestic bald eagle – no, really – devoured the hapless rat, then soared off; leaving nothing behind but small tufts of gray fur and the bacon I used as bait.
Which tells you something about bacon, huh?
Later that afternoon, with the trap cleaned and safely stored away and my fingers healing nicely, we were sitting at the table when a gentle tapping came from the back door. I opened it and there was another rat, pointing at a bird feeder. “Uh,” it said in a voice straight out of a Disney movie. “Don’t you think this one’s getting a bit low?”