Rats in the chicken run

 

One of a family of brown rats Rattus norvegicus living under a hen house at Home Farm in Beamish museum, entertaining visitors with their antics last Sunday, dashing out to eat a broken hen’s egg.

Rats have a liking for eggs. My grandmother, who worked on a farm, lived in what was then a very rural part of Sussex, with food stored in a larder. As a child it upset me that she prevented birds from building nests in her garden hedge, but she had a fear that rats might come for the eggs and then would find their way into her house.

We have an acquaintance who lives in a house next to a smallholding where the owner keeps several breeds of animals and stores feed that often attracts rats. They are highly intelligent omnivores and will eat most things that they can digest. Last autumn we watched them from her upstairs window, as they climbed her apple tree, nibbled through the stalks of ripe apples, then rolled the fallers downhill, through the hedge, to supplement their animal feed diet.

A sobering statistic: female brown rats begin to breed at three months old and can produce three litters of up to twelve offspring each year.