Guest blogger, The Huntsman Channel, shares his experience from a recent Rat Hunt.
Read below for information on baiting, locating Rat-Runs and general tips on Ratting.
Rats! Like them or loathe them have been around for, well, since the dinosaurs popped their clogs. (Thanks Wikipedia.)
Rats are extremely intelligent animals and can be quite a formidable quarry species to the uninitiated, and are new to the Shooting sport.
Wherever you find people or livestock, there’s probably a rat colony not too far away.
Left unchecked and the rats will breed producing large numbers over a short period of time - five litters a year producing up to 7 or more offspring per litter - so any rat infestation needs a quick proactive solution.
So before they can gain a foothold, its time to humanely remove them before they become a bigger problem.
Now on this particular shoot, I was called out. The use of poison baits is a big 'no-no'.
With livestock roaming freely (Chickens) the use of poison baits just isn’t an option.
For this particular job I had to crack out the PCP Air Rifle.
Close quarters rat shooting on a public allotment, the PCP Air Rifle firing at the legal 12ft/lb limit is an ideal safe tool for the job.
Unlike the Rimfire and Centre Fire calibres I use on other pest control jobs, the Air Rifle is far more suited for close-quarters rat action; a good pellet drop-off and hardly, if any, chance of ricochets; it really is a no brainer.
So the rifle of choice on this occasion was the Daystate Wolverine Type A.
The Wolverine in .177 calibre dispatched the rats out to my zeroed range of 25/30 yards.
Shooting from my comfy seated position, the Wolverine was fitted with a Spartan carbon fibre Bipod and a Hawke Eclipse 30 SF 4-16x50 IR Rifle Scope, so dispatching these pesky fellas was easy-peasy.
...Well not really.
Rats at the best of time are skittish, nervous creatures, sticking close to cover especially in daylight hours. I can only shoot this allotment during the day and getting that spot on humane headshot is just far more difficult than you could imagine.
This is where fieldcraft comes in. Rats will generally use established pathways (rat runs) where they will to-and-fro from cover to wherever their food source is.
Establishing their rat super-highways and you're partly there.
Look for smear marks on the base of huts, well-trodden grass trails, faecal matter along the routes too are also key indicators.
Once you have found the rat runs and generally know the rats comings and goings, next up is the bait.
Any rat pest control job I do when it comes to baits, I look at the main food source of the rats that are there and try and adapt the feed to things they're eating.
And in that I mean liquidising.
Any solid bait and the rat will just simply grab it and scarper off undercover, even before you have raised the scope to your eye.
Here on the allotment, the main food source of the rats is grain. Placing liquidised grain (mixed with a little olive oil) the glue-like substance placed at various points on their runs can be too tempting for the passing rat.
As well as adapting the rats main feed I also add my baits along the runs; a double whammy for them and to hopefully stop them dead in their tracks.
When it comes to rat baits there really isn't one that trumps all the others. One colony of rats may have a liking for peanut butter and another for liquidised sweetcorn. There really is no hard and fast rule concerning baits apart from liquidising.
Experimenting is key.
I remember one colony of rats I had to clear would not look sideways at any bait I placed out. This particular shoot was on an estate and the main food source was simply full slices of bread left out for the birds.
All the fancy liquidised baits left on the runs and the rats would not pause long enough for the all important headshot.
These guys were addicted to white bread, peanut butter, liquidised sweetcorn, even the smelly aroma of pieces of tuna didn’t stop them in their tracks.
So I simply crumbled the white bread, very fine, making little clumps of white bait along their rat runs, which eventually stopped them.
OK, they still gobbled the bait up then scarpered off with a mouth full of breaded crumbs but it did halt them long enough to take the head shots.
The rats were eventually cleared and one happy homeowner was glad to see the back of them.
[WORDS: The Huntsman Channel]