Rats

Can anyone please tell me, how to stop rats around my bird feeder 

  • Hi Pepper, if you have feeders and food is left lying on the ground, I would take all the feeders away, turn over the soil or clean up and wash the ground area and wait a while before you start to feed again. If you have no feeders and put out food, again stop, clear up and introduce food again in a week or so.
  • Hi Pepper. We had to stop using suet balls for a while because of this problem. Too much of them ended up on the paving below. We now use suet pellets, and a feeder with a tray beneath it, so there isn't much debris around. Good luck!
  • I clean under them, but it's soil under them, I do stop using them every so often, but they always come back when I start again
  • I stop using my feeder every so often, but they come back everytime I start using them again
  • You could always do what my friend's neighbour did: sat camouflaged in his bushes and shot the rat, startled the other neighbours rather.

    Everyone keeps telling me I will attract mats and rice (as we call them) and so far once we had one sweet mouse hanging off the nut feeder, not seen it before or since.

    I wonder if all the ground feeders, and there are many, many of them, are holding off the vermin. We have the infamous collared doves, woodpigeons, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches, dunnocks and the squirrels do a bit of clearing up too.