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Mystery activity


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We have a small terrace right outside our door.

Some time during last night something :

nibbled the young shoots off some climbing roses - around 150 cms of the ground - and left the shoots on the ground untouched below the roses

cut through the plastic string attaching the fat ball to the tree at about 2 metres and made off with the fat ball - it's disappeared

managed to "unscrew" the saucer from another birdfeeder - the screw has disappeared!

started on the clematis shoots.

Any-one got any ideas what this is, and what I can do?  I don't want to put poison down but I may have to use a trap, I guess.  It must be quite small to be able to balance on those young rose shoots.

Hope some-one can help.

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For the rosebuds - it could be deer. Adult deer are quite tall, and we lost all our early rosebuds to deer last year.

They also damaged 2 new vines we had just planted.

We try to persuade our collie to sleep outside and guard the garden.

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Thanks for all the suggestions!

We have no neighbours, so that one is not too likely...but we liked the idea!

as for the (Easter) rabbit, could be!

We have lost many roses to deer in the past, but they eat the shoots rather than just cutting them off and leaving them on the ground, so I don't think that's too likely either.

Incidentally our collie loves being outside at night, but doesn't seem to scare off the mystery guest.

So, I'm still left wondering and hoping for help - could it be rats, as we have seen them fairly close?

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We think we may know, now, as we stayed up and watched countless rats rushing about - they are very smart and look as if they should wear waistcoats and grey flannel trousers - but we don't want quite so many quite so near the house, so drastic measures have to be taken.

They reach sexual maturity at 3 months (only slightly less than humans, therefore!) and gestation is 24 days, I think.  That's a lot of rats even with a 50:50 ratio of males to females, in one year...I worked out that with a litter of 10 we are looking at a minimum of 500 rats starting from one pair...

So now we are looking for any-one with a terrier they don't want!

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  • 2 weeks later...
I had a similar thing happening in my garden near the end of last year, took me ages and a lot of cunning to finally snap the cunning critter who visited my garden during the night leaving strange scratch markings in the grass. I'll see if I can find the photograph.
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