More rats!

The war goes on. The day after the last post a mama cat came by. We quickly fed her and she decided that was cool and has now been regularly hanging around part of the day. This immediately decreased the day time rat sightings at least. But mama cat goes off to her kittens for long periods too and I think the rats have figured out her schedule. Two nights ago I was looking out my 2nd floor window and saw three BIG rats snooping around down below. I fleetingly wondered if they would ever get so hungry as to climb the walls and get in thru the kitchen window but was too sleepy to get worked up about it. But the next morning I saw that they had indeed climbed in through the kitchen window! They’d enlarged a spot where the screen was starting to pull away from the frame. They had eaten half of two mangoes and a sweet potato! Now I began to get worked up!

We put out a mixture of bread and cracker crumbs mixed with cement that night. We taped the screen. We moved some junk away from beneath the window that we thought they had climbed up. We set the TUFFCAT traps on the window sill. We tried to close the jalousie windows but since they hadn’t been closed in about 10 years they were stuck open. We dripped sewing machine oil on the screw thingies and managed to get two sections working the but the third was obstinately stuck open.

Yesterday morning there was no evidence that the rats had gotten in. But this morning they obviously had gotten in, we lost a couple bananas and another sweet potato. Unfortunately the rats do not like my mixture of cement and cracker crumbs. (Only the cockroaches and ants liked it.)

Luckily for us, the owner’s handyman showed up this morning to work on one of the empty apartments. He had enough extra screening to change our holey one. He also was able to get the third window to close. So now we are feeling a bit more hopeful about keeping the rats out tonight! Very good timing too as today was market day and we have a whole new supply of fruit and vegetables!

They say that if you are seeing rats in the daytime that means there are a lot of them. So there must be a lot of them because today I saw one sitting on top of a wall in the heat of the day. (Watching us?!) Unfortunately mama cat was looking hopefully at me and had her back to it. Otherwise she surely could have gotten that one!

The handyman in all seriousness advised us to not talk harshly to the rats lest they become angry and really wreak vengenace. Ha! Do the rats speak English?!