Rats AND gophers???

[jjjennejjj]

I went camping for the weekend. I have about 70 chickens and I use hanging 5 gallon buckets with pvc feed openings. They hold about 25 pounds of pellet feed each.
I filled them up Thursday night. I have some breeding groups separated from the rest of the flock. When I got home, 2 of the pens had empty food buckets. That's almost 50 pounds of food in 2-3 nights! It is not scattered on the ground and the buckets have a strong musky/urine smell.
I killed a possum recently that was trapped in the run because I accidentally left the door open overnight.
I have a deep litter system and hwc under the pine shavings. (But it has mostly rusted. There is a concrete layer surrounding both the run and the coops. I have never had anything other than rats and snakes break in, but have tons of critters in the area.
I noticed a dirt mound with a 3" hole in the top right next to those pens and assumed something tried to dig in that was blocked by the concrete. I also found new mounds with similar sized openings in my garden area near the chickens.
I definitely have rats which are currently worse right now because i have a temporary stack of treated wood nearby for a build project and a couple usually scurry out when I flip the tarp off to pull out 2x4s. But this is the first time I have ever had THAT much food go missing that quickly. There are also missing eggs. But my chickens are all untouched.
What could have possibly eaten that much??? My brother suggests gophers bcuz of the coincidental new mounds and corresponding drop in food supply, but I can't picture gophers jumping a foot to get into the pvc openings. I have 2 barn cats, and 3 livestock guardian dogs, so I don't want to do poison. I have 2 water bucket rat traps set up near those coops with the missing feed. I am going to have to switch to daily feeding vs weekly feeding. I'll set up cameras as soon as I do the 1000 other things on my Spring-Must-Do-Now list.
In the meantime has anyone else dealt with something similar?

 

[Al Gerhart]

Rats, not gophers, I've never had a customer needing a feeder because of gophers. Might could happen but very unlikely.

Channeling Howard E., there are three methods of dealing with rats, sanitation, exclusion, and elimination.

Sanitation, bulk feed in barrels, feed in treadle feeders that are rat proof (most are not), clean up pathways the rodents travel through. It will cost you a couple hundred bucks at most for a feeder, a metal drum or galvanized trash can with a tight lid, and some labor cleaning up the materials and tarp.

Exclusion, a Fort Knox coop. You tried that but the hardware cloth rusted away. Very expensive.

Elimination, the water bucket traps you have already or other traps and poison. Rarely works, the rats are smart.

Your first thing is to get that material pile cleaned up. Rats will live within say 100 feet of their food supply. Once you clean up the hidden pathways they use to get from their food to their den they are forced out into the open where your dogs and natural predators can help thin the ranks.

Next, secure the feed. Bulk feed in a metal drum or barrel, research online to find a good treadle feeder. Not Amazon, only Chinese junk sold there and you are paying 35% for their fees, the door has to be pre loaded with springs or the rodents just push the door open, needs an inward swinging door for safety and to trap the rats if they swarm the feeder, and a narrow and distant treadle, not a big wide treadle. Build a base using two or three patio blocks to set it on, making sure there is room in front of the treadle for the hens to step up on before stepping on the treadle, and securing the feeder to a wall or post or setting a couple of extra patio blocks on top. You don't want a lid that lifts up, not safe, takes weeks to train, teaches the rats where the feed is too and none of those Chinese made feeders like the Grandpa feeder have spring loaded doors so the rats just push the door up and climb in, then climb out when full.

This isn't rocket science. Stop feeding the rats and they are forced to leave to find natural food or starve to death. Once the feed is shut off they will begin to starve and begin coming out looking for food, your cats and dogs and the natural predators will wipe them out quickly.

Do a forum search on rats and chickens, this topic has been beat to death so there are hundreds of threads with some of the silly old wives tales. Find Howard E.'s posts on rodent control as well.

Good luck!

 

[jjjennejjj]

Rats, not gophers, I've never had a customer needing a feeder because of gophers. Might could happen but very unlikely.

Channeling Howard E., there are three methods of dealing with rats, sanitation, exclusion, and elimination.

Sanitation, bulk feed in barrels, feed in treadle feeders that are rat proof (most are not), clean up pathways the rodents travel through. It will cost you a couple hundred bucks at most for a feeder, a metal drum or galvanized trash can with a tight lid, and some labor cleaning up the materials and tarp.

Exclusion, a Fort Knox coop. You tried that but the hardware cloth rusted away. Very expensive.

Elimination, the water bucket traps you have already or other traps and poison. Rarely works, the rats are smart.

Your first thing is to get that material pile cleaned up. Rats will live within say 100 feet of their food supply. Once you clean up the hidden pathways they use to get from their food to their den they are forced out into the open where your dogs and natural predators can help thin the ranks.

Next, secure the feed. Bulk feed in a metal drum or barrel, research online to find a good treadle feeder. Not Amazon, only Chinese junk sold there and you are paying 35% for their fees, the door has to be pre loaded with springs or the rodents just push the door open, needs an inward swinging door for safety and to trap the rats if they swarm the feeder, and a narrow and distant treadle, not a big wide treadle. Build a base using two or three patio blocks to set it on, making sure there is room in front of the treadle for the hens to step up on before stepping on the treadle, and securing the feeder to a wall or post or setting a couple of extra patio blocks on top. You don't want a lid that lifts up, not safe, takes weeks to train, teaches the rats where the feed is too and none of those Chinese made feeders like the Grandpa feeder have spring loaded doors so the rats just push the door up and climb in, then climb out when full.

This isn't rocket science. Stop feeding the rats and they are forced to leave to find natural food or starve to death. Once the feed is shut off they will begin to starve and begin coming out looking for food, your cats and dogs and the natural predators will wipe them out quickly.

Do a forum search on rats and chickens, this topic has been beat to death so there are hundreds of threads with some of the silly old wives tales. Find Howard E.'s posts on rodent control as well.

Good luck!

Thanks. I checked it out in person after dark and it definitely IS a rat infestation. Dozens of them scattered along the walls and metal roof. I shudder every time I picture it. This is the first time in 6 years of having chickens that I have had this happen. We just cleared and burned a football field area of trees and brush about 20 feet from my chicken area. I guess a colony moved in. I am freaked out and thoroughly disgusted, but do know the steps to take. Thanks for your time. I wasn't trying to start a what-to-do about rats thread, I genuinely couldn't believe there could be so many rats that that much feed could be eaten. I thought it was some other animal. Live and learn...sometimes the hard way.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Now you know. The feed loss probably sneaked up on you, like watching a kid grow, suddenly he is five feet tall. It is not likely that that many rats survived in the wild without some sort of food provided by humans. Animal feed, trash, compost, something was feeding them.

Just do your research carefully, watch for the sites that do articles on the "best" feeder if they have a direct link to Amazon. They are shilling for commissions and refuse to include feeders that don't pay a commission. We had a program once, didn't get any use at all, it was too easy to find us online I guess. You know a manufacture is going to toot their own horn LOL but lots of people don't realize a lot of the sites pay their way from Amazon links and the like. Read the negative reviews first and they count more than the 5 star reviews, they are the ones that had a rat problem, most people just buy a feeder because they want a chicken feeder.

Oh, watch out for your cars. The rats will eat electrical insulation and can total out a car in a few days. It doesn't hurt to start the engine and move a car around every few days just in case. Doesn't seem to affect the pre 80's cars, just the newer ones where some idiot designer decided to score points by removing oil based plastic with soybean based plastic. Mom had her car ruined twice, totaled the second time because she left the car sitting for a few months after she got older and driving was more difficult. It was a lucky break for us kids, 95 years old and driving is a bad mix.

 

[Seaslug]

FYI: The rats did not necessarily eat all of the food that night -- they just carried it away that night, stockpiling it for later. That is what they do when they have free access to food.