If you live in the country in an old house or a middle-aged house or even a youngish house, you have critters in the walls. You hear them in the night, partying between the studs, chewing something which you fervently hope isn’t your wiring. Your house is alive with a whole separate rodent civilization within its walls.

They love to set up housekeeping at the head of your bed the better to entertain you in the middle of the night. “Red squirrels,” you mutter to your spouse, or to your pillow if there is no spouse. You pound the wall and that quiets them down for a bit, just long enough for you to start to drift off, when they pick it up again.

“Mice,” you decide when you find tiny little pellets of poop in the kitchen drawers. “Must be mice,” you reassure yourself when the cracker box has a hole gnawed in it.

Then comes the night you’re awakened by sounds inside your house. You find things, big things, knocked over. The tray at the bottom of the birdcage is pulled out, a potted plant is on its side. The plastic top on a can of olive oil is chewed clean off.

And whatever is in your house can climb. The lid to the cocoa tin is askew, a bag of chocolate chips ripped open, and then – oh my gosh! The whole box of Christmas chocolates, the whiskey-filled chocolates you’d been hoarding in the cupboard shows up on the floor of the greenhouse, torn apart, just a litter of candy papers left behind.

There’s no more kidding yourself. You have rats.

I admit it; I have rats.

But don’t be overly alarmed; it might not happen to you. My house is perhaps unique in that half of the sunroom across the front has a dirt floor, a greenhouse where I can grow plants right in the earth. The original stone foundation of the ell forms the back wall, and over the years we’ve shared that space with various critters who’ve tunneled in between the rocks, including one winter a weasel, but mostly mice or shrews or voles that never ventured beyond the greenhouse area. An elaborate series of tunnels lead under the wall from outside, tunnels that “they” know all too well. Hmmmm. Walls don’t keep them out. This is beginning to sound vaguely familiar. Walls, tunnels, bad actors. Never mind.

So how is it after years of playing host to cute, tiny mammals who obligingly stepped onto the traps I set (one winter I caught 81 mice; I kept track with hashtags in my calendar), that this year I have rats?

Apparently I’m not alone. Articles have appeared in the past few years that the rat population is on the move. When there was a fire at the Rockport dump a couple of years ago hordes of rats moved out into the neighborhoods, invading homes that had never seen one before. It turns out they seek bird feeders, and the seed that covers the ground under them. We winter-bound Mainers love our birds and go to great lengths to bring them right up to our windows.

Sunflower seed, bits of suet, cracked corn, millet – a ready-made feast for rats. We’re used to trying to foil squirrels from climbing into our feeders, but who worries about the bits that fall to the ground? A friend looked out her window last winter to see an unusually large rodent rooting around out there and realized to her horror that it was a rat.

And then there are the chicken coops. Backyard chickens are a fad right now; they’re even keeping hens in Brooklyn these days. Our henhouse or some version of it has stood in the same spot for nearly 50 years, and as near as I can tell, rat-free. Or at any rate, if there were rats they were circumspect.

That ship has sailed.

Over this past summer they’ve been boldly tunneling in under the floor, then gnawing their way inside. Undoubtedly this wild and woolly population has migrated from hen house to people house. I did my best to ignore what was going on, but realized one morning that the empty metal feeder had been licked clean. Chickens don’t lick. Those beaks and all.

The place is riddled with their tunnels. Their beady eyes glimmer at me from just inside their holes as they wait for me to leave; they rustle around behind the grain cans, hoping I’ll spill some. I’m sure the hens are well acquainted with them and used to sharing at the feeder.

Then I think of Wilbur and Templeton, the pig and his friend the rat in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Then I remember what an excellent Wilbur our son Ed made in his fourth grade play, along with his good friend, Ben Hazen who was a fine Templeton. Kristi Pottle did Charlotte.

I digress.

Rats freak people out. Especially lying helplessly in bed, hearing them run rampant around the house. It’s tempting to just get up and leave. One friend admitted he picked up his shotgun and blew a hole in the wall where they were frolicking. This guy lives alone, no wife to shriek “what the hell are you doing?”, and he says he hit it.

I like to think my chocolate-loving rat (remember the chips, the cocoa, and the whiskey-filled candies) was done in by his addiction. I was in Florida the day a grandson discovered a large (they’re all large) dead rat lying on the rug. They sent me a photo. They think Fritz got it. For a dog he’s especially tuned in to the nightly depredations, and will lie for hours beside a noisy wall, ears cocked, waiting, waiting. If the chocolate didn’t kill it, perhaps it was drunk on the whiskey and slow on the uptake.

After the photo/text I came back from Florida determined to rid my house of these intruders. A live trap set under the bird cage, a spot near the greenhouse where I knew they had a tunnel, caught six, one a night. These were young rats, nothing like the big, hoary one Fritz got.

Remembering stories of what Maine women did with unwanted critters they trapped, I fill a bucket in the sink and drop in the trap. But not before looking it over, seeing its bright (no longer beady) little eyes, a poor terrified creature. One morning a grandson was there and wanted to know if I would let it go. No, and I told him what I had to do, that actually I didn’t like doing it, but that rats don’t belong in our houses. Did you tell him about bubonic plague, my friend asked later, a man who can see nothing positive about a rat.

Little Jack took it all in, then stayed to watch it drown. I don’t watch.

But since rats reproduce at an alarmingly fast rate I’ll never trap them all. And apparently you can’t poison them out of existence either. The guy at Aubuchon told me that D-Con has been weakened so as not to poison pets and isn’t really effective against rats. I did buy one of those huge wooden rat traps and set it out in the henhouse with peanut butter for bait. Caught an enormous one the first night, as big as my size ten shoe. I’ve got a photo of it.

One thing I could do was call Brian and Tammy Littlefield, the couple many in Lincolnville have come to rely on – to mow lawns, shovel and plow snow, build stone walls, dig trenches, chop wood, clean henhouses, cut trees, build stuff, almost anything a country-dweller might need help with.

That old stone foundation in my sunroom needed to be encased in cement, the rat holes sealed up for good.

In a few hours the Littlefields had done it, installed a layer of rat wire (yes, that heavy, quarter inch mesh stuff) under the dirt planting bed and poured a cement foundation over those crumbling rocks. No more noises in the night inside the house, just the familiar and gentle gnawing and scrabbling around in the walls, reminders that we’re never completely alone.

School

The weekly Lynx newsletter is always interesting with articles about kids and screen time, about ways to keep kids safe and healthy, as well as upcoming events, reports on projects and sports that students are doing. It’s a great place for community members who don’t have children in school to stay up on what goes on in our school. Lincolnville Central School is one of our town’s biggest assets!

Library

Knitting & Needlework meets Tuesday, Jan. 22 from 4 until 6.  What a great escape on a winter evening.  Knit, crochet, felt, cross stitch—bring your project, make new friends, have a cup of tea.  Newcomers are always welcomed. 

Always a Possibility

Do you follow the Lincolnville Fire Department’s Facebook page? Here’s the report from the scene of a fire call last week:

“01/15/19 @ 11:31 AM we were dispatched to Greenacre Rd for a vehicle fire.. It just happened to be a big vehicle, a compactor trash truck. On arrival the cab was fully involved, front tires burning and plenty of burning oils dripping from under the engine.
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“We extinguished the fire fairly quickly and were hitting a few remaining hot spots. It was then that we noticed smoke coming from the rear part of the truck, yes, the very well sealed container the trash is compacted into.
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“There is no easy way to open one of these compactors when the hydraulics have burned off. A plan was made to open a rusty seam at the top edge of the body. We were using our extrication spreader (Jaws of Life) to do this job. Firefighter Pete Rollins was about 12 feet up on the properly footed ladder…...on a recently sanded but yet icy driveway.. Pay attention, this is when it gets exciting .
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“As FF Pete was working the tool, the ladder he was on kicked out sideways. This is never good. Down came Pete, the ladder and the tool. For those of you who can’t stand the suspense, the ladder and the tool were just fine. We know for certain now that firefighters do not bounce. Pete seemed to be in a bit of discomfort…...back pain and right wrist pain.

“The ambulance was called and off he went for x rays. … The x rays came out fine. …. He is bruised and his right wrist is much larger now.

The fire was finally extinguished after a lot of work, Pete was released from the hospital and life goes on. Firefighting is a dangerous job. We all know this and do our best to “get it done” safely. Best wishes for a speedy recovery FF Pete, or do we call you Lefty now?
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“Be careful, be safe and when in doubt call us out.”