Over the summer we had a huge problem with a burgeoning population of enormous rats nesting in the banks of ivy in our garden. They’d scurry in and out of the hen run at night, stashing little piles of food under the hen houses and scaring the bejesus out of me when, startled, they darted past me from their hiding places. We spent a significant proportion of lockdown trapping and poisoning the little blighters until I thought they had all gone. The little food caches have now started to reappear and there are frequent deposits of rat poo around and in the feeders. Have started on another campaign of annihilation and thought I was winning as sightings of rapidly moving brown blurs and trailing, twitching tails had reduced. Tonight as I shut up the hens, I looked inside to check for eggs and my head torch illuminated a perfect tableau of “Guilty Rat Caught in the Act”. I found the sneaky (pretty hefty) creature poised on its hind legs with its front paws around an egg, head turned towards me in astonishment, eyes wide and tail and whiskers twitching. There was a brief stand off as we stared at each other in surprise and then it whisked round and disappeared under the straw to emerge out the bottom of the shed through the hole it had chewed in the floor.

Cheeky bugger.

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