The hens each eat about 100-150g of special food pellets which contain all the stuff that they need in their diet and they like to eat through the day so it’s not really practical to ‘feed’ them daily: if it rains, the pellets get wet and disintegrate. We keep their food in a big hopper thing – it stores 10-12 kilos of food and lasts about a month between fills. They think it’s great!
Before we got the hens, we built a coop for them to sleep in. While clearing the ground where the coop would go, we found a mouse in a nest. There were babies in the nest so we moved it to another part of the garden and got on with our business. Once we got the hens we wondered if the mice would steal their food. A year went by, then two, and we didn’t see any mice at all.
Last summer I was out in the garden digging for something, and found another mouse. I caught it, showed it what the underside of my size 15 rigger boots looked like, and buried it. There was a second mouse – but we only saw that one because the hens were making a commotion – not because they were afraid of it, but because one of the hens had caught the mouse and had it in her beak: the others wanted it. They ran around the garden for a few minutes and then Penny, the hen who’d caught it, tossed her head back – throwing the mouse into the air – and then caught it – and swallowed it whole. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes I would never have believed it.
For about a week afterwards I put a small trap like this one outside the coop once the hens had gone to bed each night, and each morning I’d find a mouse. After about a week the capture rate fell and stopped. Every couple of months since then I have done the same – leave them for a while then blitz them once a new family moves in.
 Small mouse trap |
 Mouse and rat trap together |
I lost a couple of traps – no idea where they went – but I’d set them, go out to check on them only to find that they’d gone. I blamed the neighbour’s cat – thinking that it was using my trap as a fast food takeaway.
Last weekend I put a couple of traps down and in the morning I had a mouse – but only one trap. I couldn’t see why the cat would steal one mouse but leave the other. On Monday night I saw the security lights come on in the garden (they detect movement in/around the coop – the hens know how to use them and will sometimes have a late night, sitting on the perch outside. When the lights go off, one hen gets up and walks around to put them back on again, before returning to the perch). I looked through the window in the conservatory and saw my problem: it isn’t a cat, or a clever mouse, it is a rat!
During my time catching the mice I’ve found that the most effective bait is chocolate – I’d been using Cadbury’s Fingers because the biscuit gives a good anchor for the trap’s hook, but Lidl’s cheap chocolate works just as well really – despite what one northern friend suggested, southern mice are not posh or picky.I need now to find a good rat bait, but first of all, I need a good trap which they can’t simply steal. Down to the local hardware shop yesterday then, and I got three rat traps and a couple of new mouse traps. The rat traps are nasty things – I was always a bit nervous around the mouse traps because it’d hurt if they got my fingers, but I don’t know if my fingers would survive the rat traps – they really are mean.
The mouse traps are only 99p each so it doesn’t matter too much when they get stolen, but the £3 rat traps can’t keep going walking – so obviously they have to be secured. I’ve built myself a trap array and will be setting it each night until I get the rat(s). I will post my findings here, with a note of the bait used.
Last night I used a chip on each trap and caught nothing. I don’t yet know if the rat I saw was just passing through or if he was a local so I could be chasing my tail. He might only come out food shopping once a week, we’ll have to see. The only problem I can imagine now that I have some proper equipment is that the rat trap is so strong that if it catches a mouse it’ll simply explode. Their eyes are usually bulging out of their heads with the little traps as it is!
Bring it on!
