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Rats!
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Please forgive me if I am raising a topic that has been covered before. Its ages since I joined in the Forum – sadly my husband died in August and I have been busy elsewhere! And my trail camera seemed to have given up the ghost as well and it was low on my list of priorities to fix. However, last night, armed with new batteries and a new SD card I managed to get 77 images! Some of hedgies – great – but some of a rat! And a sleek, well fed rat to boot! As I live just off a nature reserve and almost alongside the River Blackwater – and have a footpath and ditch at the bottom of my garden – Im not too surprised but I would prefer not to encourage them. Any ideas how I can keep the hedges and deter the rat!!
Hi DwarfHog
So sorry to hear your sad news. It must have been a difficult time for you. Glad that the hedgies are still visiting.
There is lots of info. about rats somewhere, I’ll have a look when I have a bit more time, but by the sounds of your surroundings you might not be able to prevent a few rats from time to time. Maybe a cat? Not that the ones that visit here even take any notice of mice – more interested in trying to get at the hog food!
Hi again DwarfHog
I found this https://www.hedgehogstreet.org/forums/topic/rats-4/ which has some other links about rats contained in it. Hope you might find something useful.
But if you really want to stop rats getting hog food, it might mean supervised feeding, i.e. only feeding the hogs when you are about to watch and frighten any rats away. In the past, I have found that rats are much more sensitive to movement and sound than most hogs are. So it’s often possible to scare them away without the hogs noticing.
Good luck.
Thank you. I see from my camera images that my hedgies seem to visit early in the evening up to about 9ish. so I might just pick the food up after then. I’m loathe to stop feeding as they are just so charming and – given our location – rats are a bit of a given anyway!
Watch this space!
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