Monday, October 12, 2009
I RECEIVED an email the other day from a lady who was appalled because she’d just spotted a large rat sitting on the peanut feeder she puts out for the birds in her garden and nibbling at the contents.
Her reaction was to take down all her feeders and put out rat poison. But then she started to miss the birds so she emailed me looking for a solution to the problem.
I get these queries frequently and I have had problems myself with rats trying to get at the wild bird food. It tends to be a seasonal thing because rodents instinctively store food in the autumn to see them through the winter. Rats are quite interesting animals but I can understand why people don’t want to attract them into their gardens.
They are also very agile. It turns out the lady who was looking for help had the feeders hanging from the eaves of a garden shed and the rat had climbed up the wall of the shed to get at them. In my case a rat climbed up a garden hedge and then jumped off it onto the bird table.
The solution lies in re-locating the feeders. Rats are agile but they can’t fly. They may be able to climb up the post of a bird table but they won’t be able to walk upside down on the underside of the table part to get at the food. Feeders should be hung from thin twigs or suspended by lengths of twine from thicker ones. Fine wire is better than twine because it’s difficult to gnaw through.
A similar problem that I get regular queries about is how to prevent large birds such as rooks, jackdaws, magpies or pigeons from scoffing all the food you’ve left out for the robins and blue tits and the same solution works to some extent. There is a considerable weight difference between a blue tit and a jackdaw and you have to hang feeders so they will support the weight of small birds but be unstable if a larger one tries to use them.
Unfortunately members of the crow family such as rooks, jackdaws and magpies, are very intelligent and are particularly good at problem-solving. Some time ago I had a running battle with a very intelligent rook that took a fancy to those fat balls in a plastic net that I hung from cup hooks screwed to the edge of the bird table.
My first solution was to suspend the fat balls from a length of garden twine. The rook’s solution was to snip the garden twine with its powerful beak, pick the fat ball off the grass below the bird table and fly off with it.
I then substituted very strong fishing line for the garden twine. The rook couldn’t snip through this so instead it hauled the fat ball up and laid it on the surface of the bird table before eating it. I gave up and stopped feeding with fat balls.
The ultimate solution is not very pretty but it is effective. Go down to the garden centre and select some netting, either wire or plastic, that has a mesh size large enough to allow a small bird to get through but small enough to keep out the intruders. Then use it to build a cage around your bird feeding area.
But don’t just give up. Right now there is still quite a lot of natural food for them in the form of berries and insects. But this supply will soon start drying up with the arrival of the first frosts. And all the research shows that feeding garden birds has a significant impact on their survival.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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