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Pack Rats
I have been fighting a colony of pack rats on my property. There is no joke or implication here, this is a real problem. More precisely the rodents are known as White Throated Woodrats. These are incredibly destructive animals. They have nested in my truck which is parked outside. I also have a nest of them in an old race car. I have also found them in my tractor. These are probably also the same rodents that have chewed through landscape lighting wires and other electrical wiring.
I have set a couple of mechanical traps and they have not caught any so far. I built up a contraption out of PVC pipe with internal electrodes that has killed a couple of them. The PVC pipe works by turning on the power to an electric fence power supply when they are in there. That seems to be quite effective at killing them. I have been baiting these traps with dry dog food strung onto fine stainless steel wire. They trigger the trap when they tug on the kibble.
An additional problem is that these varmits can be a vector for Bubonic Plague and Hantavirus in my area. There are no reported cases coming out of my locality, but this is a serious problem with serious consequences. I am going to have to wear a respirator and disposable coveralls when I take the nest out of the race car. I have to spray for fleas and other biting bugs that can carry the Plague.
Has anyone else on the board dealt with these animals before? What brought this to mind is the other thread about the hornets. I have been trying to kill fleas and rodents at the same time in two or more places.
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Pack Rats
What brand/kind of rat poison do you use?
I have no idea how many of these critters I have. There are rat droppings everywhere and it started building up very rapidly. Coyotes get into the barn too, but they don't generally cause me any problems. If anything, they probably catch some of the rats. I have never seen one of the live rats in the daytime.
I think that I want to continue to use my electrical contraption for a while until I stop getting hits on the bait. If I poison them now, when there are a large number of them, I am afraid that I am going to have dead rotting rats inside stuff in the barn.
The problem in the Southwest is that the fleas leave the dead rats, and they are the pests that can transfer the Bubonic Plague to humans. The rats are the carriers. As I said, plague has not been reported in my area, but there were several cases in NM last year. Hantavirus is even worse. Most people don't die from plague anymore, but hantavirus kills about a quarter of the people infected. So, I have to spray for fleas as well as control the rats. Otherwise, the fleas can get on rabbits and other mammals and survive. I am thinking about using one of those indoor insect bombs in the car with the rat nest in it.
This is not as bleak as it might seem on the surface. The plague and hantavirus tend to hit in defined areas. (Not where I live) Every now and then, someone will get infected when cleaning out a barn in random areas, but the infection rate for hantavirus in deer mice is about 50% and for Woodrats, the infection rate is below 10% for virus and plague. I don't have many deer mice, so the chances of having the infection in my area is low, but the consequences are high. The virus and plague don't kill the rats or mice.
Randy, I did not suspect that you were a cat person. 
Cats don't live long in my neighborhood because of the coyotes. House cats have also been linked to plague infections when they have brought in fleas carrying the plague. At this point, I don't have any cats or dogs.
Randy, send my your new email address when you get a chance. I guess that it has changed after you moved.
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Pack Rats
I have been using kibble dog food and they hit it every time I bait a trap. I have non-trapping tubes that I bait also that are fakes. They have gotten used to walking into tubes to get baits and when they walk into my electrical contraption (3" PVC pipe with electrodes and switch) they start tugging on the dog food kibble and they get fried. Rock (grey) squirels would also probably get in these traps and they will go after dog food also.
I have been taking the dog food kibble and drilling a hole in my baits and running a piece of SS welding wire through it. Then the bait is wired to the trap trigger. When I have baited the traps without the electrical supply connected, they have actually chewed through the welding wire to take the bait home. Now that I seem to have them trained to really tug and pull on the baits, they hit my electrical trap pretty regularly. I have been wiring kibble to my mechanical rat traps also. It is more work to drill/wire kibble, but I have had cheese stolen from a few traps without it being triggered. (or a triggered trap with no rat) When my electrical apparatus gets hit, I definitely have a dead woodrat inside.
I like Murf's idea of the box trap. I think that these woodrats live in small colonies, so they might follow one another into a box trap. Now that I have the rats used to crawling into tubes to get baits, perhaps I should attach a shop vacuum to the closed end of the pipe. I would bet that a 16 gallon shop vac would hold quite a few woodrats.
I wish that we did have TSC out here. When I lived in the midwest, I used to go there all the time. There is nothing like that here. I will have a look online.
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Pack Rats
I have heard numerous stories about Rat Zappers getting triggered and the bait taken without a kill. I am not sure why. A friend of mine improved his kill rate by putting the Rat Zapper on a wet towel so that their feet get wet before entering.
The adult woodrats just fit in a 3" PVC pipe, and in my contraption there are electrodes all around. The electric fence transformer that I use is old and probably more powerful than some of the newer ones that I have seen. Also, it plugs in and produces continuous electrical current after it is switched on. The Rat Zappers shut off to save the battery. I used my fence transformer in California to keep Opossums off of my roof and it would even kill them. A gardner also climbed up on my fence to trim a tree and got into my fence wire but he survived. He was not happy and I doubt that he ever climbed my fence again.
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Pack Rats
Last night I got the first bait stolen from the electric trap without them triggering the electrical current. I am beginning to think that these Pack Rats are as smart as squirels. Anyway, the current potential victim seems to have used a method that thwarts the trigger.
I am going to modify the trigger a bit tonight. The first trigger that I made turned on the electric when the rat pulled on the bait. It appears that this one pushed on the bait against the wall of the pipe to eat it. So, I will change the switch to work on push or pull.
I may also cover the bait with a porous cloth or screen to make it more difficult for them to steal it.
I also had another missed trigger on my mechanical trap last night. These traps look like bigger versions ofthe wood mousetrap. I have a very small leg trap that I might put out with wired bait. It is about the size that you might use for a coyote. I don't know if the pack rats have enough weight to trigger it, but if they do, it would surely kill them.
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It is interesting that you mentioned that. I have been sketching up just such a trigger circuit that would latch a relay and apply high voltage when the beam is broken. But this has to be done without the high voltage coming back into the sensing electronics and destroying it.
This has become an interesting puzzle. I am trying to make it as simple as possible, but I might try the light beam approach in the future.
I also have some very sensitive microswitches that have a small wire on them. If you touch the wire in any direction, it will trigger the relay circuit. That will probably be the next generation before I resort to light beams or PIR.
I was kicking around some ideas with a friend of mine about this problem and we figured that after we got a good trigger signal from a switch, light beam or whatever, that we could do just about anything after that from closing a trap door to turning on a vacuum cleaner motor.
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I don't have any grain or food sources stored either. I just live in the high desert like Mark and these things live everywhere around here. They are opportunists and will come in out of the rain. (when it occurs) The point is that they will live inside as well as outside.
The car that has been infested is an offroad race car. It is not exactly air tight. It is being stored inside a barn that is not air tight either, so the rats get in there. I am building an new "tight" shop, but it won't be done for a couple of months. I don't want to clean it out because of the Bubonic Plague and Hantavirus potential that the fleas and feces in the nest will carry. This weekend, I am going to put an insect bomb in the car and that might make the place undesirable for the rats also.
If you read the thread about the undesirable neighbors, you might understand that I moved away from a pretty nice place with a nice shop because I had a neighbor that was a loud abusive jerk that was connected into the political structure and I was constantly being charged with this or that violation of zoning or covenants. It was a total pain. I am just trying to get a new shop built and get my life back to normal after a move a year ago. Finding a contractor to build the shop was another adventure.
Murf, my first design had no switch, but the rats would not go in to take the bait. They could either sense the 7000 volt potential or they got a slight jolt before being fully inside and decided to dine elsewhere. So, the switch was to make sure that they were in the middle of the kill zone. They would not even go in there before I grounded the power supply. At first I just wired it up floating and they would not go near it, but would eat the bait out of the passive tubes that I had placed around. Currently I have the trap sitting on a large metal plate that grounds the fence transformer and the rat walks up on the plate and into the copper lined PVC pipe to get to the bait. By the time he tugs (or pushes as of last night's design update) on the bait, the rat cannot get out without taking a lethal shot.
What I am trying to do is to reduce the "inside" population without having dead poisoned rats in places I cannot see. After I stop getting hits on my trap, I will switch over to poison baits for general control.
I was talking about this with a buddy and he is building up a copy of my trap, but he is going after squirels. He is using a neon light transformer and I suspect that he will literally fry the squirel in place. I did not want the liability of a lethal device, so I opted for an electric fence transformer that I know is powerful enough.
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Pack Rats
Just an update.
I have caught six or seven pack rats in total. I am no longer getting any hits on any of my traps or passive bait stations. So, I think that I wiped out the colony.
I dropped a fumigation bomb into the race car and re-covered it to kill any fleas and insect pests. It looks like they were using the expensive racing seat as a toilet, so I have some work to do there with enzyme cleaners.
I also sprayed around the open part of the barn and dropped a couple more fumigation bombs into the closed part of the barn. I haven't seen any live rats, spiders, or insects in the area since I finished my assault.
I am going to clean out the nest in the car this weekend if I get time. I will also lay down some of those waxy poison bars to kill scouts that might check out the sterilized area.
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Pack Rats
I don't have any dogs. I do have a pack of coyotes roaming the area. If they get into the rat poison...too bad. I don't actively hunt the coyotes, but they aren't domestic animals either.
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08-01-2005, 16:32 
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