nov 3 2022
Since I moved here in 1979, I have gone through two rat infestations the first happened when the developer started to dig the holes for the foundations of the development next door now called partridgeberry place.. the area had been totally wild forest and had a lot of critters living there//which then moved into my barn.. I really didn't pay a lot of attention at first because farms generally have a rat or two .But rats have a way about moving in and inviting relatives and becoming prolific .... at one point I noticed that when the Essex County Co-op delivered my bags of grain which I think was five bags every two weeks by the time I got to the bottom bag it was totally empty that would be 50 pounds of very good grain... healthy corn... molasses ...all that sort of thing that was eaten by probably rats.
let me be clear to start with in my head at least. in the daylight you have squirrels and chipmunks lovely little things and at night you have rats and mice they're on a time schedule they know the score.. add a few owls and Hawks and things like that and the whole thing balances out very nicely as long as the rats don't get ahead of you.. which they did way back.
I do have a photo somewhere taken in the dark somehow with about 10 rats on the puppy hill fence.. which meant I was into hundreds of rats... but luckily all seemed to be in the barn -----they didn't have to go anywhere else ---they had grain to eat... and a roof over thier heads... so I started a rat eradication program with all the crazy ideas people had sent me on how to trap a rat ---buckets of water and seesaws and strange things -----I found that the victor snaptrap was most efficient and I found that once I had used as a trap it didn't seem to attract as many rats the next time so I got into the habit of throwing them out ---trap and all... Until George Myers put me in touch with raptor rehab---there were two---- one in Byfield and one in Hamilton---- then when I caught a rat I quickly put it in the guesthouse freezer in a bag and we jokingly started the "frozen rodent delivery company" .. these are big healthy grain fed rats with no poison in them and for quite a while i'd. drive around and deliver rats and mice to feed the Raptors---it worked very nicely.
but to really get rid of the problem I got one of those hoses that you put on the exhaust of your car and stick it out the garage door so you don't kill yourself.. except I put it on my car and put the other end down the rat hole I don't know how many rats I killed but we had an awful lot fewer rats during that phase of my life and I still would catch one or two with my victor snap traps.
This phase of my life was also the phase of animal episodes and I had many many commercial jobs done with rats and mice.. in order to advertise what we now know as the computer mouse--that was a simple job----I had one of those wire umbrella sort of things that you put over the barbecued chicken to keep the flies off it at a party--and I would stop at the pet store on the way into Boston and pick up two mice set them down to be photographed hold them in place with my crazy umbrella lift the umbrella take the photograph and the check for $150 and go home.
the rats were a little more complicated but to deliver a rat onto a movie set. I had two sources one was a wild rat in my barn captured in a havahart trap. the other more simply stop at Essex agricultural school where they had laboratory rats... I could borrow... and I used rats several times... the most amusing was to deliver a rat onto a set at a specific time and place, I had a four inch PVC pipe. I would put the rat in one end and then with the portable air compressor I blow air at it and it would go out the other end which would put it right specifically where any director would want it.. the difficult part there was I had to catch it and take it home because heaven forbid I should turn a rat loose in Boston---- Boston being the 13th most rat infested city in the United states but I did catch it and bring it home... and having made considerable movie money with the rat I didn't think it right to destroy it so I took it off into the willowdale state forest which is probably where it came from in the first place and turned it loose.
Too be continued....
