Learning with the rats in my garden

I'm big on recycling, or to put it differently, I try to keep my contribution to landfill to an absolute minimum, and hardly throw anything in my black municipal bin.

The city of Cape Town handed out free composter about a year ago, and this is where my organic waste now goes. This was a welcome contribution to my recycling efforts as my banana peels and leftover organic stuff ended up in the corner of my garden before. 

Notwithstanding my best efforts, sometimes there are leftovers from cooked meals that do not work in my composter. I therefore found a place in my garden for leftover food and bones, meant for the birds and animals visiting my garden.

The Cape Robin is one of my most frequent visitors. I do have cats that come at night, but as I'm not a fan of cats, I found a way to make it more difficult for them to visit. The biggest consumers however are rats.

I'm not a fan of rats either, and by attracting them, I got my opportunity to reduce their numbers and monitor how many there are in my immediate surroundings.

I have an air gun - 'windbuks' - and every rat I kill is a traumatic experience. They scream and jump, sometimes they die instantly. It always leaves me shaken, it leaves my rubbish bin smelly, and carrying the dead rat to the bin is also a major effort, trying not to touch it.

During months of attracting rats with my leftover food, I started to see patterns of behavior. First there were the big grey rats that come during daytime and that was an easy target. They got the message that this is a war zone, and I haven't seen these ones for more than 6 months now. 

Then a smaller, darker specie of rats started arriving, usually around sunset. They came in groups of three or four, moving along the boundary wall - sometimes even running on the vertical side of  the fence, into the trees in my garden, and then scavenging on ground for what else there were besides the little guavas and berries they fed on in the trees. These rats were more difficult to control, but they usually seems to move on after about an hour.  

There are similar, darker and bigger rats that seems to have made a nest in a shack between my house and the neighbors. These ones also came out mostly at night, and they started to settle in, making paths and tunnels, and I saw this population grew to at least 3 or 4. They started to target my composter, digging tunnels to get in from underneath. This lead me to protect the composter by putting down 'On-show' boards around the base, covering these with soil and mulch, and my problem was just about solved. They did try to eat through the plastic material the composter is made of, but stopped short of getting in. 

Feeling nervous that they may get into my house, I cut down on the feeding and furthermore decided to leave the dead rats in the garden for a while, hoping that their friends will smell the danger and move away. At least one of these dead rats disappeared, either eaten by a cat or possibly even by the other rats, and I think they got the message.

It's now been about 3 weeks that I haven't seen a rat in the garden, even though I've put out leftover shrimp shells, the left over of a T-bone steak, pasta leftovers and small amounts of other food that continues to disappear during the night.

All in all, the experience leaves me with a feeling of adventure, a welcome distraction, here in my very own small garden at the back of my house in Observatory, Cape Town.