Ratty and the Mandarine Tree

In early winter 2023 I noticed that some of the mandarines that were ripening on our tree were being hollowed out, sometimes thrown to the ground and sometimes left hanging on the tree. After some investigation I found out the annoying truth: ratty was stealing our fruit!

After a few weeks their depredations were not slowing down at all so I was forced to work out what I was going to do, but it was at this point that our seventeen year old kitty, Honey, marched into the house with a very rough looking ratty. I thought she was past it! Anyway she was relieved of said ratty, suitably praised and given cat treats as a reward. I was happy!

Now it is 2024, and I started to notice similar thefts except on a larger scale, and after some reconnaissance it became clear that this year we had two ratty’s! I also found out that they seemed to be shacked up in the banana circle and using banana leaves to run from the bananas to the mandarine tree at night. They would eat their fill and return to the bananas before morning.

I knew that Honey had become too old and feeble to carry out a reign of terror on the ratty’s this year, but hoped one of the neighbourhood cats would help. This was not the case.

I needed to work out a control plan before we lost all of our mandarines (curse those ratty’s!!!) so I took to going out through the night with my head lamp, surprising them and hassling them and the bananas that were their base of operations with long sticks. Effect =0

I will say at this point, my control strategies did not include baits (rat poison) because I did not want to cause problems for local cats or avian predators who might come upon a sick or dead ratty, eat it, then be killed themselves. I had to sort things out without resorting to poison!

I did, however, resort to traps. I tried both whap-and-kill type traps and get-stuck-on-you sticky traps. For the most part, Effect =0.

But. I was continuing with my harassment program and noticed one night that a branch near the worm shed was swaying when I walked out and I thought I could hear some scuttling on the roof of the shed. As a result I placed the two traps I was using on top of the shed and the next morning I was pleased to discover a rat corpse. One down: one to go!

Unfortunately, the remaining ratty was much smarter and was able to avoid my traps, even though I changed the places I left them, and was unmoved by my harassment. At this point, to make things more difficult for ratty to access the mandarine tree I cut down all the banana leaves that ratty was using as a bridge. There were only a couple but they were high up, so I had to use my chainsaw-on-a-stick. Effect = 0

This was starting to drive me crazy, plus the number of mandarines on the side of the tree facing the bananas were considerably reduced.

During my ratty harassment program (RHP) I had noticed that it caused considerable angst for ratty because he could no longer use the aerobridge, but had to get down on the ground to get away from me. So I wondered if winding sticky tape around the various trunks at about the same height and to cover 150mm to 200mm whether the shine sticky tape would prove resistant to be scaled by the ratty. Effect = 100%!

All of a sudden, the ratty depredations have ceased! We have unmolested mandarines! It stopped totally the same night I put the tape up so I am assuming causation not coincidence because ratty is still around and I hear rustling when I go out at night, winner!

Well, it seems that ratty had just gone on holiday and was now back in force, and

• Had brought a friend back,
• Was back in the tree, and
• Had moved camp into the shed where I stored my straw and was mucking about with it!

So, it looks like it was coincidence, not causation.

Having moved into the straw shed did have one advantage for me – There were plenty of solid, flat, level surfaces in which to mount traps. Up to now, another problem with the traps had been (as well as few places to put them) that I was using my traditional go-to rat/mouse bait – Peanut butter!

Both ratties had been very successful at avoiding my traps so I had to think about it some more and after deep thought I rebaited the traps and low and behold the next night one ratty succumbed and the night after the second ratty succumbed! My new bait – mandarine segments!

Finally, Ratties = 0; me = 2.