Squirrel Interdiction Fail and Rats?!

I was working on my garden this last Saturday when as I stepped out on my back porch, a common brown roof rat shot out from under the stairs and across the yard. It had been eating dropped bird seed.

It went in the direction of a neighbor’s yard that isn’t usually mowed, and has a lot of shrubbery and overgrowth. I was shocked because it was dead middle of the day. It was black and small, so I think it was a roof rat. It was not one of the bigger ones.

I do find this a little concerning, and this might be the inevitable outcome of bird feeders, and a garden.

I did some research and learned that you can add spicy pepper to your feed mixes and the birds can’t taste it, but mammals can. This actually might help with the squirrels which are literally digging up my entire yard and garden.

I tested it with the peanut tray, which the squirrels get into, and boy do they hate it! It’s 3TBSP to a pound of seed, and it works well. I added a little olive oil to make sure it stuck, and it worked. The crows still got the peanuts we feed them, and the squirrels are off elsewhere.

My wife is sad, but they are literally destroying the yard, digging up all the clover seeds, and every garden bed I have looks like this now below.

As for my Squirrel Interdiction efforts? The reason they got into the area was that I used chicken wire. Chicken wire has too big a holes to use. I just ordered $300 in hardware cloth with 1/2 by 1/2 squares, and not I have to redo the entire structure this winter.

Sigh. Squirrels 1, me 0.

My New Plan

I am going to wrap the structure in hardware cloth. I am just going to do it over the chicken wire. I can’t see how that would matter at all. It will just create a double layer of fuck you to the squirrels.

I am going to cayenne pepper the bird seed and peanuts. That will give them less incentive to destroy my yard and my garden, and my wife will still have all the birds. The hawk that sits on the fence and looks for rodents might have to look elsewhere, but I am fine with that.