We have rats in the garden.
Two and a half years of chicken-keeping, and this is the first time we've had a problem. I don't know if it's because we no longer have an outdoor cat, or because the council cut back all the shrubs and bushes in the spring and deprived the rats of natural sources of food and shelter, but they've decided to make a new home in our garden. I wouldn't mind - I'm a zoologist after all, and few beasties bother me - but rats carry salmonella (and worse), and my poor girls are too scared of them to sleep in the eglu. This means war!
The problem has been that the days are so short, we only go out into the garden briefly to feed the bantams, and when we do it's usually half-dark. So we hadn't noticed the tunnelling around the rockery, and since chickens can be enthusiastic diggers themselves, the odd hollow patch in the run wasn't a big deal. Plus all three bantams were moulting, so a sudden increase in the amount of food being eaten wasn't that suspicious either. However the neighbours had reported seeing rats earlier in the autumn, and once I saw all the evidence together, it was obvious what was going on...
We tried taking the food in at night and blocking where they'd been digging, but they just made new routes in (possibly to get at the chickens' water). When we discovered the girls out in the garden one morning despite my husband having shut the run - which meant they had been roosting in the bushes somewhere - we decided it was time for action. As it was only two days before Christmas there was little chance of getting the council to do anything (and they charge fifty quid just to come out and put some poison/traps down, or thirty quid callout fee if there's no sign of rats!), so we've started taking our own measures.
The eglu and run has been moved to the patio temporarily, and we've been taking the food in at night and making sure the girls are shut in (much easier now we are on holiday and thus at home in daylight hours). Yesterday I did some research on the web and discovered that depriving them of water as well as food helps to encourage them to move on, so I have removed all the containers (such as an old bucket) hanging around the garden. I also poured a bucket of cold water down the hole they had dug under the eglu, and raked soil over the entrance. No sign of cold wet rats, so maybe they have moved on already! I'll do some more clearing in the garden, then move the eglu back to its normal location and see how we get on. If they come back, a few nice powerful spring traps should sort them out! I'd rather not use poison, as the smell of rotting rat is apparently vile, and I'm not particularly squeamish about removing a mangled dead rat from a trap...