the clue--a shrew

I asked what the pest guy is doing coming by early January.  He found a reason.  Apparently one pest was moving about.  An adolescent rat?  He thinks it's a shrew.  A shrew?  Thought that was a renaissance rodent Shakespeare wrote about.  No, I'm told.  This is related to the vole, an insect-, berry-, and nut-eating critter. There was no struggle this zero-degree day.  That rat trap (bigger than it looks) could severely hurt your finger.

Rat in the cellar

I post this reluctantly...hopping many are out of town for an end of summer vacation. Several week ago I called our pest company and asked them to analyse a hole in the cellar, freshly dug, right next to the cnetures-old stone wall.

After two service calls, they determined that it was a rat hole and two deadly traps were set. It seems that the outside cellar doors had been left open overnight and a wandering rodent checked us out.

Now there are two possibilities--that our investigation, our plugging up the hole, our placing of traps at two places, has scared the rodent away; or, that the critter is lying low, waiting for the dust to settle. In either case, we've got it covered. Well, I'm not letting the dust settle. We're doing a full-court press. The outside door is being closed. And all manner of things will be well, as the saint said--not for the rat but for us.

That's organic peanut butter as bait on the trap.