Catherine Drea: 'Don’t let rats put you off feeding birds'

I’ve written about the beauty of country living and how much solace there is in being surrounded by nature.

Today, I’m facing up to one of the greatest challenges, which is when Mr or Mrs Rat come to visit.

I remember listening to David Attenborough talking about the wonder of wildlife and then suddenly when asked if there was any animal that he didn’t like, hearing him admitting that it was rats. 

It made me feel a little better that I have a low opinion of them too.

Apparently our fear and dread of rats comes from the days when they carried the plagues across Europe. 

The rats were infected and as the Pied Piper demonstrated, they had to be gotten rid of by any means. 

Unfortunately many of them still carry disease and so it’s not surprising that most of us dread them.

Everyone has their own rat story. I have quite a few myself. 

There was the time when we were renovating an old house and one came into my kitchen, stood up on its hind legs and examined the washing machine.

Then there was the time I found one in the bathroom soaked to the skin and lying dead on the floor. 

He had entered the house via the toilet.

But my favourite demon rat was the one that grabbed my sandwich from the table beside my bed while I was reading a story to my son.

I think it was the same lad who dragged my sparkly Christmas shoes across the floor and tried to drag them out through the hole he had come in through. 

Building and plumbing in rural Ireland are an open invitation to country rats to poke their noses into our business in far too many creative ways.

I try to accommodate them in my environmentalist’s mind. 

They are not too far removed from squirrels I muse, but for some reason that never works and when I come face to face with one, all my romantic notions about cute little mammals goes out the window.

My father tried to soothe my anxieties with the notion that our rats are nice brown country rats as opposed to the sewer rats of New York for example which are the size of dogs and when cornered will jump at your jugular and take you down. 

I know I told him, and they have incredibly cute little hands.

I first noticed these hands when a pheasant hit a window on the house and died instantly. 

By the next day the whole thing had been demolished and I had witnessed the culprit up close. 

It was the bloody hands that caught my attention. It was worse than any horror movie!

Now the reason I am back talking about rats is that for the first time, and on Earth Day too, one has decided to invade the bird table. How did I get away with it for so long?

There’s no doubt that there is a lot of food around the garden. 

The delight of feeding birds is so addictive that I never let a day pass without providing a couple of meals for the whole lot of them. 

All kinds of finches, tits, wrens, blackbirds, robins, collared doves and dunnocks live here probably just to avail of the breakfast buffet.

I even feed the bank voles, who in turn are grub for the owls and birds of prey and somehow the whole situation works. 

At night an occasional hedgehog or pine marten might visit but there is never too much aggro out there.

There are starlings nesting in the roof, bats under the eaves and a house martin’s nest over the front door. 

The larger birds like thrushes and magpies only visit occasionally as they are not really seed eaters and I once encountered a cuckoo up close in an apple tree.

I can’t stop feeding them, as they depend to a large degree on what I provide, especially through the winter and at breeding time. 

So in spite of my “make love not war’ commitment, I have come to the conclusion that the latest rat has to be done in.

Now I know very few people are going to bother about preserving the life of a rat and will go straight for the poison or the rat trap. 

But I agonised over it to be honest.

The humane trap simply didn’t do the job. 

The idea was to catch him alive and dispose of him out in the fields. 

He gave a very wide berth to the hunk of cheese and instead re-emerged fully alive on the bird table again!

So reluctantly the full rigour of the law will now apply and a death sentence hangs over him. 

Naturally, Himself is on the job and I am turning a blind eye to the goings on. 

Just like that moment in Jaws, I said to Himself, we are going to need a bigger boat.

Don’t let rats put you off feeding birds. The pure joy of seeing them thrive is worth every bit of rat invasion bother. 

Just keep a good eye on who is visiting. At this stage I can hear the alarm calls if a magpie or a sparrow hawk gets too close.

Myself and my army of small birds seem to be on the same page, let peace and harmony reign once more.