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If you’ve had rats at your home before, you know all about it. You’ve heard the scratching noises in the ceiling, maybe you’ve seen them running along the fence or in the backyard. You know, when they start to get courageous, they start coming up close to the home and leaving their telltale little droplets of poo around the place. And rats are a nightmare.
They cause safety hazards around your home, so they can chew wires in the roof which can cause fires, and their urine and their poo is poisonous to us. It carries pathogens in it that can cause things like leptospirosis and hantavirus. And you would’ve heard of hantavirus a little while ago with that ship that went to South America.
So the last thing we want is to catch the hantavirus, so we protect ourselves through rodent control. And the way that we do rodent control at Mount Lawley Pest Control is that we inspect homes first. So we don’t just go there and throw baits around the place; we inspect homes first, and we follow a logical sequence.
We start with exclusion, looking for ways we can stop rats getting into the home. And most of the time I go to homes where there’s rodent infestations, the first thing I find is trees overhanging the roof of the house. Now, the rats we have here in Perth, they’re very athletic. They can jump 50 centimeters vertically and about a meter horizontally. So as you’re doing your gardening, and certainly as you’re planting any trees around the home, keep that in mind—that rats find it very easy to get onto the home, get into the home, if there’s trees overhanging your roof, or they’re within 50 centimeters under the gutter or one meter sideways.
So, we also look for things like maybe building materials leaning up against the house, or the home might have been constructed in such a way that it provides easy access. So if there’s like a wall that intersects your house and the boundary fence, but it comes up quite high under your eave, that can provide direct access for rats to get onto the roof.
Okay, the next thing we look at is food and water sources. So commonly around Perth, things like mangoes, figs, olives, tomatoes, strawberries—these are all things that rats love, you know. They love eating oranges as well, and sometimes they’ll even eat lemons. So we ask our clients and we advise them that they remove fruit from the ground when it drops from the trees, and that any fruit that’s on trees, as it’s just about to start to ripen, we ask that it be taken off the tree and left to ripen inside the home. That’s a great way to minimize the rats’ access to food around the garden.
As far as water goes, there can be things like pet food bowls, or maybe drip trays for pot plants. If you could be careful not to overwater your plants and bring your pet food and your pet water inside the home.
We then look at harbourage areas, or hiding places for rats. So when there’s an accumulation of personal effects, rats find it easy to hide. They love lush gardens as well, so lush gardens give them plenty of protection from birds, cats, dogs, and humans, who are their main predators. And, you know, they love being in there; they love hiding there. So we ask that we keep garden trimmed down to a minimum, and in fact, if you’ve got plants on your boundary that prevent seeing about the bottom 30 centimeters of the fence line, we ask that you trim that vegetation back.
We then go on and have a chat about trapping systems with our clients. So another great non-chemical means of control is using trapping systems. The only thing with trapping systems is that they’re notoriously slow for the rats to become confident enough to go up and start eating bait from the trap. Rats are very careful; they’re a very shrewd animal. So we always do these inspections and look at these trapping systems.
Finally, we talk about baiting systems, and there’s different baiting—I think there’s three different types: generation one, two, and three. So the second-generation rodenticides are very popular at the moment. They’re called a single-kill rodenticide. And, you know, I’ve controlled a lot of rodent infestations at homes with rodenticides, and I’ll continue to use them if we’ve exhausted all attempts at controlling the rodents using exclusion methods or by reducing food and water, and reducing harbourage areas. So we’ll still go and implement baiting systems after we’ve had a look at all of those other things first.
So when it comes to Mount Lawley Pest Control, baiting for rodents is the last thing we do. You know, we do follow a logical path: we go chemical-free where we can, and a lot of the things that we propose to our clients don’t cost them any money. They can do it themselves: trim a few trees, get a few items away, especially from the entry doors to the home—so your front door and maybe the back door out to your patio area. Make sure that you don’t have any hiding places for rats right near those doors, because all rats need is that door to be left open and the house to go quiet for five minutes, and bang, you’ve got rats inside your home in the living areas.
So, that’s it for me. If you want to have a chat about rodent control, give me a call on 0410 581 108. Thanks a lot for listening in. See ya.