They are very intelligent and It helps to know what the rats are doing. If you can tell where the rat is traveling, how the rat is getting inside, or if there are still rats in the building it can make the whole process a lot easier. So, I use a tracking powder that answers a lot of these questions. To learn more about rat control check out our rat trapping page
If there were rats in this house, they were living in style. The house was large, beautiful, and had a copper plate on the front corner showing the date that it was constructed. It think it was built in the twenties, but it had been renovated in style. It was three stories with a pool out back and a wine cellar. Rats don’t differentiate between nice houses and bad houses because all they want is a meal and a place to hide. Nice houses can easily provide both.
My client said that her husband had been trapping rats for three months. He had caught ten rats in that time, but she wasn’t sure if all the rats were gone. Her husband had done well and ten is a good number. Unfortunately, he had a few traps show up fired but empty. This made me think that there was a good chance that she still had some rats. On the phone, she had asked if there was a way that I could check and see if they were all gone. I came over to have a look.
I found poison boxes behind the house. She said that the poison boxes were there the whole time while her husband had been trapping. An exterminator had been there before me and failed. The box was fully loaded with poison, but obviously it wasn’t working. The lady was more than a little put out that she was paying a monthly bill with the exterminator, but still had this problem.
Eternal Feces and Tracks
Sure enough, I found rat droppings in a drop ceiling and behind a cabinet, but that really doesn’t prove anything. As I tell my customers, what happens inside the house is eternal. Feces, footprints, gnaw marks, carcasses, etc. do not degrade like they would outside. Someone may disturb them or clean them up, but if that doesn’t happen then they are there permanently. There is no rain so feces just dries out and becomes hard. It is there eternally there in your attic, walls, crawlspace, or behind your cabinet. I don’t think that the lady liked this concept, but she appreciated my knowledge of rats and critters.
My Secret Weapon
To address my client’s question, I went to the truck to get tracking powder. I had seen tracking powder used at Virginia Tech when I was in college. We were taken out early before sunrise to trap mice in a field to do a population study. As part of the exercise we got to “shake and bake” some of the mice. We dropped one or two of the captured mice into a bag of tracking powder and then released them. They ran right back to their nest and we could track them easily even in the dark. It was a blast.
If you are trapping rats, you probably have a lot of questions: “Where are they coming from? What are they eating? Why aren’t they getting caught in my traps?” If you are near the end of your little rat adventure, you may ask yourself “Are all the rats gone?” In my early years of trapping I ran into all these questions myself. I tried all kinds of traps and bait without varying degrees of luck (a lot of it bad). But, in the end, it was being able to monitor the movements of the rats that made all the difference.
Once I learned how to track rats, I really jumped ahead of the game. Rats can be very trap shy. If the bait is still in your trap for three days straight, does that mean you have killed all the rats - not really. It just means that your bait wasn’t eaten. There are plenty of times that rats are wary of the bait being used because they are extremely careful.
Before I left, I sprinkled a little bit of the powder around in the kitchen. I added some behind the trash can, some between the dishwasher and the cabinet, and a couple of other places. I left her with instructions to contact me in the morning and let me know what happened.
Rat tracks found behind the cabinets.
OMG Get Back Over Here
I got a text from her early the next morning. “OMG” it read “get back over here”. The photo that came with it showed a huge fan of prints that came out between the dishwasher and cabinet. She was agitated to say the least. She may have even been a little panicked. No, wait, that’s an understatement. She WAS panicked!
Dog Food Bowl/Indoor Rodent Feeder
The tracks ran in the direction of a dog food bowl. Ah ha, the indoor rat feeder strikes again. Rats were traveling back and fourth carrying away food to be cached (stored) in the walls of her home. There were probably several pounds of dog food stashed somewhere in her walls. She wanted to know if we could get it out. “Probably not” I replied. “You would have to tear out a lot of walls to find the cache. “
I once had a customer who had about 5 pounds of dog food stashed under a cabinet right in their dining room. The same lady probably had food in her walls and other locations as well. I told her this story. I don’t think that she was too happy to hear this either. “Sorry ma’am.”
We Needed a Plan
This is a “ black box” rat trap. This is not my most favorite style of trap. Its efficiency is nowhere near that of some of my favored “secret weapon” rat traps but it will keep pets from being harmed by the trap inside.
I struggled to devise the best strategy. Because I was dealing with rats that had already experienced a trap, I knew that this would be tough. Since I knew where the rats were feeding and how they were getting to the food source, I decided to set up in the kitchen and kill them there. I also set some traps in the drop ceiling where her husband had been trapping. He had been using plastic clamshell traps with teeth in the jaws. I hoped that the rats might acclimate to the new traps or that I might at least pick up some inexperienced juveniles.
Unfortunately, their dog had free run of the house and I had to be careful not to leave a trap out that could hurt the dog. I used a big black box with a snap trap in the kitchen where the dog might find it. I baited with peanut butter. I was concerned that this might be a difficult job because the rats had already been “trained” in her husband’s traps.
I left her with more tracking powder and we set up a motion camera to try to get a rough count on the rats. There were a lot of tracks in the kitchen and I wanted to know how big problem was we were looking at.
We Needed Another Plan
In this type of work you always need to have a second plan. In a couple of days we had no rats and tracks were still showing up in the kitchen. The rats had obviously identified her husbands’ trapping area as a danger zone and were having nothing to do with the traps there. Traps in the kitchen were turning up empty too. Why should they go to the traps when there was an entire bowl of dog food only feet away.
I hated to lose the advantage of being able to monitor the rats, but this lady obviously didn’t enjoy having these rats running through her kitchen. I decided to force the rats out of the kitchen and lure them to another part of the house where I could trap more efficiently.
Forcing the Rats Out of the Kitchen
I added my favorite deterrent to a hole in the wall behind the cabinet. The main travel path that showed up in the tracking powder let me know that this was how the rats were getting into the kitchen. I also added some along their travel corridor behind the cabinets. My deterrent uses the rat’s natural learning ability against it and makes feeding in the kitchen much less alluring. I also asked that food for the dog be taken up at night to eliminate the food source.
Instead of trapping in the kitchen and drop ceiling, I decided to move trapping operations to a dirt floor crawlspace where I could make use of a full range of traps without worrying about wounding the family dog. I opened with a standard wood and metal snap trap. I began baiting there and set more tracking powder to see where travel corridors were.
The gap between the HVAC lines and the wall was wide open for rats to pass tr
I also searched the outside of the home for entrances where the rats were entering. If I was trying to trap all the rats in the neighborhood, this was going to be a long battle. I found that several of the foundation vents had had holes in them and were definitely being used as entrances. There were also gaps around the HVAC lines where they went through the wall. I worked on plugging all this up while I worked through my rat trapping plan.
A Couple of Days Later
Activity in the kitchen definitely let off since the last visit. There was a great sigh of relief when tracks stopped showing up behind the cabinets. A combination of a new food source and the deterrent had done the trick and given temporary relief. There were also no new rats showing up inside the house since all the entrances were plugged. This was going to be critical to long term success.
The wooden rat traps turned out to be a bad idea. They were fired, but the rats had approached the traps from the wrong direction. They were being caught under the belly and being tossed instead of killed. I switched to another type of trap and continued with much better success.
Crazy Rat Safari
It took a few trips, but I finally killed all the rats. Tracks stopped showing up in the crawlspace and the kitchen and bait stopped disappearing. Scratching noises also stopped. I also had to go back outside and recheck for holes a few times, but I eventually found them all.
The customer was happy. I think that once she learned how to track the rats, she felt like she had much better control over her situation. She updated me daily on their movements. She was glad to see them gone, but I think she kind of missed the excitement. For her, it was like some crazy rat safari in her kitchen. Overall though, I think that the happiness of seeing the rats gone much outweighed the “thrill of the hunt”.