Slipping a Mickey to Mice

Anyone with a farm has an ongoing rodent problem. I’ve noticed that other “alternative living” writers deal with this issue the same way they deal with everything — denial. (Of course, it helps that most of their readers live in the city.)

Once you’ve had an outbreak of rats in your brooder house and lose a whole batch of chicks to them (and you will — everything happens to you eventually), you won’t be able to regain the live-and-let-live attitude of yesteryear. But once you decide to make the area around hour house and barn a rodent-free zone, there are good ways and bad ways of doing it.

I hate snap traps and glue traps, and I assume that ultrasonic pest control is a scam, so that leaves poison. While a mousetrap has the kind of lethality you associate with joke-shop pranks, poison is the real deal. Let’s all be careful out there. The goal is to kill off the pesky rodents (preferably so quickly they don’t know what hit them) without injuring any other creatures or yourself. The techniques should be pet-proof and safe to any little kids in the neighborhood that wander through. Extra credit for being non-messy and long-lasting, so that intermittent attention won’t prevent the stuff from working.

Not that there aren’t other methods. My grandfather once filled a washtub mostly full of water and put a layer of rolled oats on top. Then he leaned a board against the washtub to give a ramp that mice could run up. He assumed they’d do a swan dive into the wonderful-smelling oats. After several days, the tub looked just the same as before, so he dumped it in disgust, and much to his surprise, there were at least a hundred drowned mice under the floating oats! No doubt there are plenty of other methods that I haven’t tried but work in the right circumstances.

This spring, I went upscale on my rodent control, buying store-bought bait stations for rats and mice rather than improvising them. This has worked very well, and I recommend this.

Rat bait station

The Eaton Rat Fortress (shown above), is a big plastic bait station for rats and mice, meant to be left outdoors. It keeps the weather off the bait, and the wire bait rods prevent the rats from dragging entire bait blocks away to their tunnels. I hate it when that happens. By fixing the bait in place, the rodents have to eat it rather than hoarding it.

Also, when they gnaw on bait, little poison shavings get left behind. A good bait station hangs onto these so you can dump them responsibly, rather than leaving them scattered all over the place.

An allen-key bolt keeps kids from getting into the station, while baffles make the bait inaccessible to pets and birds. The transparent lid lets you see whether you need to add more bait. Very nice.

What I used to do was to nail bait blocks to pieces of wood or hide them inside lengths of plastic pipe. This was relatively ineffective. I hate it when the bait dissolves in the damp or when a mouse carries half a pound of bait pellets away one at a time and hides them in an old boot. I want the poison to stay where it’s put and be a hazard only to the target critters.

For mice, Eaton makes a cute little bait station with all the advantages of the big rat station, except that it doesn’t have a transparent lid. This works better than the D-Con bait trays I’ve been using indoors, for all the reasons listed above. The bait stations have a built-in lock that keeps kids and pets away from the bait.

Eaton mouse bait station

I’ve been using these for over a month. For some reason, a lot more bait is being consumed around the house than around the barn. Go figure. I’m especially pleased by the effectiveness of the bait stations outside the house, since I selfishly prefer the rodents to keel over outdoors, where their decomposition doesn’t stink up the house.

The only question in my mind is the effect on cats if they eat the occasional poison-fortified mouse. Last time I searched for this kind of information, I came up empty. The cats have always seemed just the same whether I have had bait out or not, though.

Sorry about the spam

I always take the “trust, but verify” approach, which means that instead of anticipating trouble, I wait to see what happens. Often in turns out that “abolutely necessary” precautions aren’t necessary. But sometimes it blows up in my face.

So I wasn’t too surprised when some spammer left “comments” on most of the posts, offering to sell you pills to put extra lead in your pencil. I’ve tightened up the anti-spam features of the blog to see if that helps. If not, there are other things I can try.

Spring, Finally

After the most amazingly wet and cold spring ever, the sun is shining. Beautiful weather. I spent Thursday in the Bay Area on business, and got home late Friday afternoon. I put the rotary mower on the back of the tractor after 7 PM and got almost two hours of mowing done before the sun touched the western hills. These long days come in handy.

The grass was over knee-high, even though I had mowed it once or twice before it became too wet to mow again. Never seen a spring like it. Normally, my neighbors would be almost done cutting hay by now. They haven’t even started yet. Strange year.

There’s some whining coming out of the gearbox in the mower. Time to lube it up again. On these “bush hog” mowers, the oil seals give out after a few years and you either have to top them off all the time or use the trick on found on the “Yesterday’s Tractors” forums: squirt in a bunch of grease along with the oil, which thickens it and keeps it from running out the bottom of the gearbox. I tried it and this worked for several years.

Last night’s mowing was a triumph. I consider mowing to be a “success” if I only mow one water line and don’t destroy anything else. It’s a triumph if I don’t break anything at all.

Love in the Spring: My new iPod Touch

Things are awfully busy around here, and I was looking for a new PDA (Personaly Desktop Assistant, such as a Palm Pilot) to help me keep my act together. I have an ancient Palm-based Sony Clie, but it’s sort of big and heavy, and anyway I was looking to reduce the number of things I lug around in my shirt pocket — a PDA, an iPod, and a cell phone is too many.

I carry an iPod not for music, but for audiobooks, so I can combine reading time with chore time and driving time. I’ve written about this before. I get most of my audiobooks from audible.com, which is a book club for downloadable audiobooks.

I also wanted WiFi access so I can check my email or surf the Web anywhere with a wireless signal, with includes my home and almost any public establishment, these days. (Wireless via cell phone is even more universal, except for the crummy signal on the farm.)

I looked at the current offerings from Palm and Blackberry, and almost picked one when a casual reference made me look at the Apple iPod Touch, the iPod that looks like an iPhone. Rather to my surprise, instead of being a mere MP3 player, it has WiFi, a Web browser, email, and most of what I want in a PDA. It also has a wonderfully conceived and easy-to-use touch screen that’s perfectly visible in direct sunlight.

So I bought one. Problem solved. I combined the three things I carry around in my pocket to two. And it’ll go to one if Verizon (the only carrier with a decent signal on my farm) ever supports the iPhone.

I’ve been very impressed by the iPod Touch. I love it! I bought mine at the Mac Store in Corvallis, Oregon, which is also where I bought my first computer (an Apple ][ in 1980).

A typical use for this device, besides reading email, is to look up information in the course of conversation — what other movies an actor has been in, the definition of a word, answers to random questions.

Apple is a weird company, and when you buy their stuff, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Their products are beautifully designed but have a high failure rate — seems like a contradiction in terms, but there you are. Your unit might fail, and its replacement might fail. It’s the cross you have to bear. Their customer service is weird and infuriating. For example, when I wanted my first iPod repaired, they charged me money to evaluate whether they could repair it, and pocketed it when they decided they couldn’t. My recommendation is to recognize that the product development people at Apple are world-class and the rest are maniacs, and just put up with it. Apple retailers are often extremely helpful and long-suffering because of this, and it probably is in your best interests to buy from them. Besides, my local Mac store had a better price than I found on the Internet.

Update on Broilers, Water Pump, and All


Greg Hayslip at Chemilizer sent me an email about my problems with my chlorine-injector unit. Looks like the issue is that, when they say, “Lube the O-rings with silicone lube,” they don’t mean Vaseline. I figured it was something dopey like that. I’ll find out Sunday. (I need chlorine in the water to get rid of the slime bacteria that clog the filters that remove the smell (and also the chlorine) from my iron- and sulfur-rich well water.)

Things have been busy around here. At my day job on the WANScaler group at Citrix Systems, we shipped updates to absolutely everything (including two brand-new products) within a short timeframe. Plus, I invented a spiffy new speed optimization and foolishly volunteered to do all the performance testing myself to help get the feature out the door. “How hard could it be?” I asked myself. A lot harder than writing a test plan and letting the guys with the right equipment do it, especially since I did it three times. This has left with with little energy left for the farm.

The broilers who had an inexplicable case of coccidiosis are fine now, through the totally explicable effects of a sack of medicated feed. Chalk one up for modern technology.

The older broilers, who are eight weeks old now and were totally coccidiosis-free, are a little disappointing in size, dressing out in the 2.5-3 pound range. We were hoping they’d be at least half a pound larger. There are Privett Slow Cornish broilers. We have a couple more tricks up our sleeve, but if the next couple of batches aren’t any bigger, we’ll probably revert to the fast-growing modern hybrids.

The issue is that slow-growing birds cost more to raise, because it takes more labor per pound of product — and not many customer are willing to pay, say, $2 more per pound just for birds that we like better, but which don’t taste any better. Worse, once they hit ten weeks or so, customers start complaining about toughness. So the clock is ticking.

Modern hybrids are lethargic and less fun to raise, and you need to raise them more gently and carefully than other chickens, but they sure grow fast.

And it’s raining, raining, raining. I feel sorry for the people who rely on their hayfields, because the grass is all headed up already. By the time the weather is dry enough for haying, it’s going to be more like straw than hay, and you only get one cutting a year here in the Oregon Coast Range. Another good reason to raise chickens instead. They don’t mind a little rain, or even a lot of rain, if there’s a roof to get under when it comes down hard.