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A Better Rat Trap

Wood Pigeon

Wood Pigeon

Seedling
Joined
Aug 23, 2026
Messages
22
Reaction score
18
Name
Charles
LOCATION
Schleswig — Holstein, in Germany
It was necessary to install rat traps on my ground-level balcony, as sometimes my wood pigeons fight up on top of my pergola, at the feed dish, and it 'rains' dried feed corn and sunflower seed. The little birds, and wood peckers, gleefully nibble away at the hanging cage of beef-suet, peanut, and oat balls there, causing crumbs all over the balcony deck.

So rats have been a problem now and then, and I bring the feeding arrangements in at dusk, and set them back a half hour before sunrise.
Sweeping up, plus washing down the deck with hot water also helps a lot.

But again rats at night! So I bought traps, and then saw somebody in internet who builds a protective house for his traps. They also only allow the rat to enter from the front, and not steal the bait from the side.

I only had a few hours before dark, so I built two such rat houses out of particle board scraps. Not my best carpentry, but time was pressing.

Rat House for Trap.jpg
Trap with white safety rod inserted though the sides.

The trap is drilled in two places, and then screwed down to the floor. So by setting, it can not tip forward and injure you.

The house is also drilled from the sides, so a protective 'safety rod' is pushed all the way through to hold down the kill bar and trip rod, until you can set the yellow plastic bait-holder.

Rat House for Trap — Showing Safety Rod.jpg
This old peanut butter had turned to 'glue'. Yuck! 🤦🏻

It also allows you to safely carry the armed house outside, without it tripping, because the safety rod prevents that. Once in position, the safety rod is pulled out, and it is set to go. In the morning, if empty, the rod is reinserted to safely carry the house indoors for storage.

I bait them with cheap lunch meat and peanut butter, plus I throw a handful of fresh feed corn and sunflower seed in the rear. That doubles the chance a rat may enter the house.

The hinged roof of the house needs to be high enough to allow the trip rod to fly up without hitting anything.

Unarmed house: First you set the trip rod standing up in a corner, then carefully pull back the kill bar, but hold it firmly down in the rear corner with a solid stick. Then flip the trip rod over the kill bar and insert the safety rod in through the side, which holds the two down. Now you can safely bait it and set the end of the trip rod into the yellow plastic thing.

But do always be careful around rat traps! I just about broke my thumb measuring the height of the activated kill bar. Ouch!!!
 
John Brown said:
Have you had much success?
Click to expand...
I caught one Norwegian Brown Rat the first night, about 03:00 AM the next morning.

I have three 45 litre containers on my ground-level balcony, within my bamboo and wood-grid pergola for my berry brambles planted there (Willamette, and Autumn Bliss raspberries, plus Black Satin, and Chester blackberries). But my bird feeders are also inside and on top of the pergola, quite a rat attraction really.

Anyway, the rats had been climbing our aluminium balcony skirting at night, and burrowed deep holes into each berry container, all the way to the bottoms! Maybe they wanted to over-winter there, while enjoying falling feed corn, sunflower seed, or suet crumbs.

So I flooded each container with at least 20 litres of water, but they kept coming back again, until I set my two rat houses across the containers.

But 'word must have gotten around', or the right species of owls, or hawks, as we have not heard anymore climbing, dashing about, nor observed or killed any more of them.

Peace at last!
 
We have moulos. I think they are the same as Field Mice. Beautiful animals, actually, much bigger than mice (perhaps 200mm long plus a tail the same length) but they live in the walls, eat the insulation (such as it is), come out at night , eat anything they can get their teeth into and poop in the larder. Now we don't keep anything in the larder unless it is in tins or bottles.
I've set many a trap where they have simply taken the bait and moved on.
S
 
Steve Maskery said:
We have moulos. I think they are the same as Field Mice. Beautiful animals, actually, much bigger than mice (perhaps 200mm long plus a tail the same length) but they live in the walls, eat the insulation (such as it is), come out at night , eat anything they can get their teeth into and poop in the larder. Now we don't keep anything in the larder unless it is in tins or bottles.
I've set many a trap where they have simply taken the bait and moved on.
S
Click to expand...
Then is this one?
Kill-Nr.1 — 18. Aug. 2026 A.jpg
 
Steve Maskery said:
No I don't think so. I've seen it only once, but it has a tail as long as its body, say 150mm + 150mm.
S
Click to expand...
This rats tail did not show up in the photo, but was quite long.

By the way:
Brown-Headed White-Tailed Eagles (Seeadler) were just about extinct here in Schleswig — Holstein, a few years ago, so the 'State Ornithologist' had them set out into the Sachsenwald Forest, 9 km east of here.

Well they absolutely thrived there, and then headed westward to us. Now they sit around on high-voltage towers, and on the rooves of high-shelf warehouse buildings in our industrial park. My wife even got swooped twice by them on her way to work along a wooded bike-path!

What is more, I even saw one in my garden, just before dusk, hunting rats!
We had quite a long stare-down, and only five metres away, before he finally flew off — such a wingspan!

So that is indeed another method of pest control.
 
Yours sound more like rats from your description Steve. Having googled using your location as France and giving the sizes it says brown rat is most likely.

"When someone in France uses the term "moulos" (or "moulo") to refer to a rodent, they are using Sinti / Romani slang (often integrated into southern French or Voyagers' argot). [1, 2]
The term "moulo" explicitly means "rat" in this specific dialect. [1]...

There was more after giving the sizes
 
Accipiter said:
Yours sound more like rats from your description Steve. Having googled using your location as France and giving the sizes it says brown rat is most likely.

"When someone in France uses the term "moulos" (or "moulo") to refer to a rodent, they are using Sinti / Romani slang (often integrated into southern French or Voyagers' argot). [1, 2]
The term "moulo" explicitly means "rat" in this specific dialect. [1]...

There was more after giving the sizes
Click to expand...
I had sent a photo of it to the AI GPT5.4 which thought it was either a Norwegian Brown Rat, or a type of field mouse. But after I mentioned how big it was, the Norwegian Brown Rat was confirmed.

By the way, these rats actually have nothing to do with Norway at all, but they started appearing in England in the 1800's, coming off of ships from Norway, so the name stuck. They originated over near Vladivostok.
 
Do you have trail camera. Steve?
I’d be wanting to find the nest and ascertain whether the nest is in the house and they are going outside to forage or vice versa.
Setting the camera up one room at a time inside or outside looking along each wall may help you find entry/exit points which can then be blocked up.
 
I don't have a trail camera, but there was no doubt where he was coming from. There was a hole in the wall of the larder and when I blocked that one up, he chewed his way out of the ceiling. But since we removed all the vulnerable food, there hasn't been a sign of him in the kitchen. But he is still around, we can hear him scratching away inside the walls upstairs.
S
 
Rats can be quite destructive and they will invite their mates around for a party.

I’d suggest a good pest control professional who will not only deal with the rat but also track where it has found a way in is needed.

We had a rat problem with a rental property. The managing agent faffed about getting poison traps laid. Given their rate of breeding and propensity to be immune to poison it didn’t work. I intervened and arranged for proper traps to be put in the loft and a builder friend found they were getting in having burrowed down under some decking until they found a gap alongside a drainage pipe. Ingenious, tenacious but definitely disease carrying vandals.
 
I'd agree with Robert and Charles on what both say.

If my Border Terriers start getting a bit excited I set up the humane live trap and then deal with whatever gets in it. Usually start to notice come autumn/winter time when putting out the food for the birds. They make such a mess - as do the damn grey squirrels. I fully understand that any rodents (including the grey - a tree rat after all) are just cleaning up and being opportunistic but I certainly don't want any around. Not helped by having the remnants of a smallholding that our gardens back onto.
 
I use housings like this for my traps but fully enclosed except a 30mm aperture as this only allows the target in rather than rabbits or domestic animals.
 
Steve,
DO NOT use poison, the buggers will crawl into an inaccessible place to die. Then they will rot and stink you out.

I bought one of these about ten years ago and it’s still going strong. I use it mainly to catch grey squirrels but it works for rats too.

I bait it with cheapo peanut butter.

Better than a break back trap incase you accidentally catch non vermin.
You will still need to dispatch any captures. I have a air rifle.
 
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The AirArms TS520 tactical is great, but not allowed where I am.
 
Once a red squirrel had just climbed my pergola to raid my bird feed, when suddenly a Chicken Hawk swooped down and packed him. (That is my kind of 'flying squirrel!' Haha! 🤣)

Anyway, it was with such a force, that my bamboo pergola tipped and then crashed back onto the bedroom window with a loud 'thud!'
 
The trouble with traps is that you’ll rarely catch two in the same trap unless you’ve got a real infestation, or very young rats, they are quite clever.

Once one rat is trapped and killed, the other rats tend to avoid the traps and the whole area where the other one died for a long time as they will associate it with death.

I’ve always had good success with laying Fenn traps across their paths outside, once you learn to look for the depressions in the grass or earth it’s quite obvious where they continually go back and forth. No bait, just tactical placement.


IMG_3204.jpeg
 
Steve Maskery said:
I don't have a trail camera, but there was no doubt where he was coming from. There was a hole in the wall of the larder and when I blocked that one up, he chewed his way out of the ceiling. But since we removed all the vulnerable food, there hasn't been a sign of him in the kitchen. But he is still around, we can hear him scratching away inside the walls upstairs.
S
Click to expand...
Steve, this would be driving me nuts. Every Winter we have mouse problems indoors and every fall I search high and low for the entrance hole, find some plug them and hope for the best. We have four bloody cats and they are useless at taking care of them.
 
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