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[CLKD]

There's a mouse on our patio  - next door's cat *will* be pleased  ... off to check seed feeders and make some brekkies for me ......

[Hotnbothered]

We have rats at the top of the garden 

[catweazle]

Hey HnB I had a rat in my garden a while ago. I thought it was a squirrel pinching the food that was on the ground by the bird table... til it turned round and I saw it's tail. EEK! I banged on the patio door and it ran off but the cheeky monkey came back again later to finish it's dinner 

I don't put any food on the ground now and I haven't seen it since.

Catweazle xx

[Hotnbothered]

We got them last year, when next door got a composter, they were fairly near to the house under some decking 
I bought poison & put it down under the decking so that nothing else could get it & it took enough to kill 27 rats (according to the box!!!!!!)
Earlier this year we got a composter & put it at the very top of the garden & I have since seen a couple of rats.....yeuck!!
We only put grass cuttings, weeds, peelings, t bags & coffee grounds in ours so I expect they are hyper on the caffeine 
I read somewhere once that you are never further than 10 yards from a rat!!!!

[CLKD]

5 feet these days  but we have 2 composts, chickens, piles of leaves but haven't seen a rat for 10 years.  Hubby had to catch and shoot the last family, she used to bring her 5 babies to drink from our pond opp the kitchen window, I got quite fond of them  but they carry lots of diseases.  Getting a humane trap from the hardware store and shooting them is the quickest and kindest, poisoning is painful and slow what ever it says on the tin    - since I had cancer in 1995 I only kill flies, grey squirrels and rats  ......... but what about those ladybirds that don't look English hiding in our house 

[Taz2]

Grey squirrels? CLKD!! How do you kill them? I hope that it is outside their breeding season - though they are seen as pests, the squeaks of abandoned young squirrels is heart-rending.

I haven't seen a rat in our garden for a while - they have been seen running across the top of the fence from time to time and I expect it is the bird food they are after. My old cat, Barney, used to bring in teenage ones - one a night for quite a while.

Taz x

[Hotnbothered]

  perhaps he missed your boys being teenagers!

[Taz2]

The most memorable time was when he decided to gatecrash my son's fifth birthday party. Right in the middle of pass the parcel in comes Barney, eyes shining, fur all bushy looking so very pleased with himself. He very carefully approached my son - they were all sitting on the floor - and delicately, with love in his eyes, laid a dead young rat on his lap! Well, all the boys jumped up screaming RAT! RAT! RAT! YUK! and ran out of the room  and all the girls in their pretty dresses and sparkly hair clips clustered round and cried "Let's have a look"

Taz x

[juju]

Yeah cats are great eh! ;DWe had a rat in the garden monday morning so OH put poison down in the shed.Its a periodic occurance and often after we've had a lot of rain,maybe floods them out of wherever.Daughter had the baby at their local wildlife area and yes there were moorhens,ducks grey squirrels and a rat.Last night I came out of work just before 11 and walked around the back to get my car.Another girl was coming out of the kitchen,she's Polish and I said oh look theres a rat!It was pitch black.She said no its a hitchcock.Well she meant hedgehog and it was!The rats seem pretty unafraid.I like squirrels as well and have told OH you cant differentiate,wood pigeons and collared doves have to be as welcome as robins and dunnocks...just the rats...ugh.

[Taz2]

Hooray! Thank you Juju - Woodpigeons are so clever! Nobody realises quite what special birds they are - they just see lumbering birds eating all the food. I have a lot of time for them. The collared doves in my garden are amongst the most aggressive of birds - I think the Dove of Peace was definitely NOT a collared dove.

Taz x

[Hotnbothered]

i saw a programme once where they taught pigeons to tap on a glass screen when something was wrong with something on a conveyor belt, they were then rewarded with some grain!
I can't for the life of me remember what the products were, but they reckoned that humans got bored very quickly checking & kept missing faulty items 

[CLKD]

We haven't seen our hedgehogs for a couple of years; 2 summers ago we had 3 regularly at 9.30 ish p.m. if they met there would be a lot of spine rattling and grunting ........

[catweazle]

Wood pigeons can live for 14 years so they must be doing something right! They are clever - I used to watch one that figured out how to unhook a bird feeder we had on the fence; when it dropped to the ground some nuts would fall out, it would then fly down and scoff them.

We have one pigeon that visits our garden and it has a limp because one leg is shorter than the other 
We've named it after a friend who has one leg  . It's been visiting for over three years because I remember telling my dear old dad about it and he passed away nearly 3 years ago. I looked up the lifespan because I didn't realise they lived that long.
 
I like to give names to the visitors to my garden. Even the big garden spiders - they don't seem so scary if you call them Sidney or something!  I even named the rat Roland 

Catweazle x

[kareneld]

i've been out to day and stocked up on bird food for our bird table.  OH complains that they have more food and eat better than we do

filled the bird table up this evening, so looking forward to seeing all the bird feeding tomorrow.

we live in the country and have 7 miles of farmland and fields behind our house, so we seem to get all sorts of bird feeding. OH bought me a bird table and a bird spotter guide book for my birthday last year but i'm hopeless.  everytime a bird lands on the table , unless its a robin or wood pigeon, i've no idea what it is and by the time i've found the book and the page, its fed and flown off .

he grew up in the country and know birds by sight and by their calls. me, i'm grew up a town (need i say more)..

karen

[CLKD]

Karene - C.mas is coming, how about a digital camera to record what lands on your bird table then you can identify it at a later date