After seeing a rat on the ground underneath our feeder a number of years
ago, we took down the feeders for a while. But we missed seeing the
birds out our kitchen window, so we tried a different strategy and have
had good luck with it.

It is along the lines that Steve Krival suggested in his post. We
actually throw our seed directly onto the ground but carefully regulate
the amount to make sure that it is all consumed before the day is over.
The squirrels along with the birds eat the seed, but we haven't seen any
rodents. We also have a suet feeder and hummingbird feeders.

By the way, while on the subject of rats, here's an excerpt from an
article that appeared in the Guardian last fall:

> The rat?s primary survival skill, as a species, is its unnerving rate
> of reproduction. Female rats ovulate every four days, copulate dozens
> of times a day and remain fertile until they die. (Like humans, they
> have sex for pleasure as well as for procreation.) This is how you go
> from two to 15,000 in a single year. When poison or traps thin out a
> population, they mate faster until their numbers regenerate.
> Conversely, if you can keep them from mating, colonies collapse in
> weeks and do not rebound.
>
> Solving the rat problem by putting them on the pill sounds ridiculous.
> Until recently no pharmaceutical product existed that could make rats
> infertile, and even if it had, there was still the question of how it
> could be administered. But if such a thing were to work, the impact
> could be historic. Rats would die off without the need for poison,
> radar or coyotes.
>
> SenesTech, which is based in Flagstaff, Arizona, claims to have
> created a liquid that will do exactly that. In tests conducted in
> Indonesian rice fields, South Carolina pig farms, the suburbs of
> Boston and the New York City subway, the product, called ContraPest,
> caused a drop in rat populations of roughly 40% in 12 weeks. This
> autumn, for the first time, the company is making ContraPest available
> to commercial markets in the US and Europe. The team at SenesTech
> believes it could be the first meaningful advance in the fight against
> rats in a hundred years, and the first viable alternative to poison.
> Mayer was blunt about the implications: ?This will change the world.?

The full article is at:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/20/man-v-rat-war-could-the-long-war-soon-be-over


Jane Hadley

Seattle, WA