.......you pay someone like me to repair the damage they cause when your wife wont let you kill them! Owner said "Well, she isn't getting anything she wants for awhile." LOL
While I'm in here, I need to replace the ball joint at the boom control link. As you can see, it is being held onto the ball with a wire tie. That brown wire in the fuse panel is where I had to bypass the hydraulic enable relay so I could get the backhoe boom out of my way when removing panels from the back glass.
Was this just a snack?
NOPE! It was an ALL YOU CAN EAT buffet. I'm not even through removing panels yet.
Enough to make one sick. Thanks for reminding me to go reload my bait boxes.
What is everyone using to control mice/rats on equipment parked outside? To be honest, I have not given enough thought to this, and this thread has woken me up a bit!
I've got one of these battery powered rat zappers. It works too!
semi-wild farm/barn cats sure help with the mice. cheaper to feed the cats than repair mouse damage. no rats here in Alberta but the occasional pack-rat around here. they can do damage but they don't breed like the norway rats and they are small enough that a cat can handle them. red squirrels around here can also do a lot of damage but the cats seem to keep them in check
I second the motion for barn cats. Feed them just enough so they stay, but hungry enough to still hunt. Surprisingly, my kids pet cat is well fed, but is also an excellent mouser. She goes out daily and is always seen stalking pray in the garden, under the porch or deck, or in my barn. I have found many of her kills laid out where I can find them, but she never eats them, just lays them in front of our door. As for the damage, rats are monsters that chew on everything electrical. I left a car in Midland Texas for 2 weeks while I went home. When I got back, it was 109degrees and I suddenly had no A.C., a check engine light and my electric cooling fan wouldn't turn off. That bugger chewed through a bunch of wires under the hood and was building a nest in the vee of the 3.0l v6 engine, under the intake manifold.
Yesterday I was working on a generator set that has sat long disused. Mostly doing engine work, and it runs fine, but once I got it started, liquid started to drip out of the electrical cabinet. Opened it up and rat nest everywhere along with all the acorns they left behind. Makes me ill just thinking about it, owner will clean it out later and then we'll probably hose it out with some chemical. Nasty.
Cats do seem like a good option, however, I do not live at the property where my machine is. I fear the cats would starve or run off to find food.
Some mothballs strategically placed about the machine works, especially for long term storage, but you also have to put up with the stank that keeps the critters away..still better than a new harness...
I feel lucky to be an Albertan. We're (allegedly) rat-free here.
I read a long time ago when critters started eating wire insulation that there is a soybean derivative used in making the insulation. I like glue traps with a dab of peanut butter in the center, because the bast***s can't crawl off and die. 2 or 3 traps side by side will hold some pretty big critters.
Glue traps are my wife's preferred method. I was out of town for work one fall and we had mice move move into our garage. She found their food source (bag of bird seed) and threw it away. Then she started setting traps, snap traps and glue traps. In 5 days, she caught 15 mice using a mix of both style traps. Then they got wise to the snap traps, but she kept catching them on the glue traps. In a month, she caught 30 total. Then she got a shock. Our garage started to stink, so she goes looking for the source and finds a forgotten glue trap with 4 mice on it. One long dead and eaten on by the 2nd, also dead. The third mouse was recently dead, and the 4th was alive, stuck to the trap, and eating on the 2nd mouse that it could reach. I'll give her credit, she eradicated our mouse infestation and drove them to starvation and canabalism. We still get them every fall, but are seeing less and less as we prepare for it and catch them before the breeding begins.
It's amazing that one little decomposing carcass can make that powerful a stink...
How about a dead fox squirrel behind the drywall in a basement wall ? Came down the furnace chimney, through firebox and then into the basement. Birds n squirrels sit on masonry chimney flues to get warm in the winter, fall in, take any way they can to get out. I put a spark arrester on the flues after that.
Out in the yard one summer evening..... many years back!..... as a group of 50 or more birds circled the neighbors house..... actually it was their chimney... and dropped one by one down the flue... wild to watch that one. Now I was a student at the time, in a rental.... so I had no idea who lived there.... and I could not imagine where all those birds ended up? Some kind of 'swift' I imagine....?? As for the hoe..... it sits outside ( under cover for winter).... feel lucky to not 'have' the wiring you guys have.... ( '85 vintage) .....plus my "rust prevention system" makes for an uncomfortable place for the furry kind to set up shop..... oil n grease you know..
They are Barn Swallows and Chimney Swifts , T-Town. They look quite different from each other. Years ago when there were a lot of furnaces burning coal in my area they were quite common. Not so much anymore.
... have only ever seen that one occurrence... but what a sight!! moving pretty fast, in a tightening circle, one dropping one by into the flue.... wow! Not sure about what was on the business end of that chimney.... but a coal fire would not have been out of place here...... in the heart of hard coal land.
I'll see your dead fox squirrel and raise you one dead 20 pound racoon that got under the crawl space portion of my cellar and couldn't get out or just died of old age.Found that sucker at the beginning of heating season when the furnace kicked on. By the time it was discovered, it had pretty much "melted" into the ground..What a treat that was crawling under there to remove that treasure...Even with bleach,lime,skunk remover, and all sorts of other potions, that lil' stinker lingered for months..
Your going to make me upchuck
Barn cats really do help a lot. King snakes are great if you are lucky enough to have them. I leave the hoods up on everything when I am done using it, but they can still find plenty of places. This sounds silly, but it has worked for me. I drape a shop towel or glove over the doorway into the bobcat when I park it. If it has moved or gone when I come back to use it, I know to go look for a rat.
... we have "field" mice here.... and some 'voles' which stay on the ground... but no rats to my knowledge. Less you count whistle pigs as rats.... Have had our camper parked As for my birds ...and after checking the Cornell Bird site.... they had to have been chimney swifts, some neat reading about them there.
.... guess I didn't finish my thought.?? Our camper is parked on a gravel pad in a field. 2nd season and no mice ..... knock on a BIG piece of wood!! But all kitchen stuff removed... peppermint oil stuff inside, moth balls hangin outside. The only 'rats' there are sometimes in the toilet ..
Nature is amazing !! and draws a crowd of clapping onlookers too....... like the bats in Texas. But more thrilling than the 'mass sponge migration'....
Its all back together now. I repaired the connector and whatever damage I could find. I pulled the MCU under the floor, but found no wiring damage there. On to the next one!
You could have detailed it before giving it back!
There are rat here. But I ve never had any problem with them. Our sailors when they have a rat problems on board. they rise a Rat king. They catch as many as five of them put them in the barrel n give no food no water, till they start to kill and eat each other. The last one to survive is most agressive and strong. They let it go free. And it kills the rest of rats on board.
I guess that is one situation where the best rat wins !
Perhaps Russian rats have a better table, and they dont need to gnow wires. Have you tried to feed them but a little far from your house