Our neighbours all have backyard chooks, and we have a large compost bin: both excellent things to have in a garden, but they are also excellent breeding and feeding grounds for rats. And rats are partial to quail eggs and baby quail, as we found out quite quickly. A large rat will attack and kill an injured or unwary adult bird if it can.
Our quail garden is completely enclosed in tough black bird netting (the type used in commercial orchards) with chicken wire placed around the perimeter as a secondary line of defence against wallabies - who will bite through the nylon net. A third of the chicken wire is dug into the ground and buried to stop anything burrowing underneath. It took us weeks to get it all set up and we thought it was impregnable.
We had a lot to learn.
We noticed we were getting fewer eggs, but thought we simply weren't finding them. Two of our little King quails had vanished but we thought they might have got through the net - they were ridiculously tiny. Then we found broken eggshells - and one night, exploring the garden with a torch, we saw a grey shadow dart out from our light and vanish into the long grass. It was huge. We set a possum trap, and checked the net the next day. The possum trap remained untriggered and there were small holes in the black netting in a couple of places - but the rat would also have to have squeezed through the chicken wire - and it had looked far too big for that. We decided it was still inside the enclosure, and started hunting for it. It was there, sure enough, hiding in the grass. We cornered it against the net in a pile of autumn leaves, and armed ourselves with two pairs of leather gloves, before blindly rummaging through the leaves and grabbing wildly when we felt it moving. We dropped it into the possum trap so we could check it wasn't actually a bandicoot. It was easily 30cm long - not including the tail! It glared at us, and fought like mad to get out of the cage. It was hugely fat from gorging on quail eggs - and extremely aggressive.
I know killing any wild creature can be a wretched thing to do - even to introduced pest species like rats - but truthfully, we didn't really hesitate before putting the cage into the frog pond and drowning its occupant. I hope it was a gentle death.
The rats kept coming though. We lost countless eggs, and, once the birds started breeding, far too many little chicks. Two of the adult birds were killed, and the daily inspection of the net for the telltale holes was a depressing morning task. Rats can get through the smallest gap - squeezing themselves through 35mm chicken wire, and biting through the black netting. We trapped and drowned two more, before reluctantly resorting to poison baits, tied to bricks and placed inside the compost bin. It worked, and we had a bit of breathing space, during which time two females successfully raised chicks.
Then we had to re-do the net, putting a second roll of smaller chicken wire over the first layer, and tying it tightly to the black netting, so the spaces were too small for even the thinnest and most determined rat to get through. This seems to have worked, so far.
The compost bin has been moved out of the quail garden and into another vegi patch, and the rats are happy digging around in it - they turn it over well! We hope that if they have enough to eat they won't go after the quails, although we still inspect the net every morning looking for holes, or signs of digging.
No comments:
Post a Comment