Rat-bikes

Well, my bikes may be a bit scruffy but that’s a bit much… No, the title is a feeble play on words intended to tie into the theme of a previous post (Elementary, my dear Watson…) about destructive squirrels.

You  may recall over New Year something strange happened in one of my sheds. Well, since then, of course, something strange has happened to the World as a whole – but here in the workshop there has been a further development.

Standing at the vice, I detected a movement: another squirrel creeping past the door toward the scene of his crime, dammit! But a long pink tail at the aft end revealed that it wasn’t exactly a squirrel this time… I pursued it and the damned thing hoppity-hopped off and disappeared through the fence to next door – our neighbour takes feeding the birds a bit seriously and with various forms of grain strewn all over the yard I suspect it is not only our feathered friends that benefit.

Well, Brother Rat had a lucky escape;  earlier this year I found an old Webley .22 air pistol in a derelict shed. It was rusted up like a Flanders relic but to my surprise I managed to get it apart, cleaned up and working and best of all, the serial number suggests it’s pre-war. Funnily enough my Dad bought a Webley Tempest new in the 1970s to counter a rat problem – but i seem to recall all the pellets went into tin cans…My Dad isn’t big on killing things and if it comes to that, neither am I. So the Webley was not deployed and it was round one to the rat.

 

Well, rat-s, I should say, because soon after I realised that either he was a very fast mover or there was more than one of them – in fact there were two and I got the impression they were ‘an item’ and intending to set up a nursery in the squirrel shed! This wouldn’t do at all….

Still, as I mentioned last time, we have a killer that doesn’t need pellets: Peter the English Toy Terrier; permanently on the alert…

 

The most celebrated of his kind, Tiny the Wonder Dog, regularly displayed his ratting prowess in a cage full of rats while spectators gambled on his performance; it was reported that back in the 1850s he could dispatch 200 rats in an hour. These genes were passed to Peter’s Great Uncle Neville, our last ETT. He could dive under a chicken shed and hurl out a body before you could say Samuel Whiskers… But not Peter.

Now, to be fair to him,  he did try to reach the rat skulking in the interior of the shed but with several bikes jammed in there he was rather obstructed by various tyres,  spoked rims, stands and footrests and after that he managed a fairly thorough investigation of the crime scene and was particularly drawn to the hole the squirrel made in the shed next to the fence…

… but as you can see, there’s more crap in the way there too (I should say those bags are full of builder’s sand not rubbish) and besides, he kept blotting his police notebook by running off to yap at people innocently walking up the street. Still the rats seemed to be more concerned abut him with him than with me trying to threaten them with my antique pop gun and they exited the building: round two to me.

I blocked up the hole left by the squirrel,kept the door shut and got Peter to make regular patrols over the next few days; he didn’t seem to pick up any fresh smells so I felt a bit happier – until I saw the rat sneaking past the door again. My mother’s “you’re never more than eight feet away from a rat” saying echoed in my ears but, be that as it may, until now I had never actually seen one anywhere near the house let alone in broad daylight!

Thinking about it, the amateur detective in me observed that both times the rat had passed the shed door, it had come from the garden, not the fence to next door. Mentioning this to Judy she said Peter had been very interested in a small hole in our back fence recently. Aha! That was easily blocked but I was still unsatisfied.

It seemed silly having a restored an air pistol to working order and not making some use of it; after all the squirrels have been a bloody nuisance this year too, digging up the garden and even scratching away at my workshop roof. I don’t want to kill them – and I certainly don’t want to wound one (which is probably more likely) be it rat or squirrel. I always think shooting things would be okay if it was like the old westerns: bang! – hand to heart – collapse dead on floor but my limited experience of things getting shot is unpleasantly different. No, all I wanted was to restore the balance a bit – knock the smirk off their faces. And that’s how I came to make my invention…

Yes, rubber pellets. Cut from sheet with a wad punch, they come out this rather snazzy authentic pellet shape. A potential future development could be to ‘upcycle’ them from old tyres… Probably I should patent the idea fast because they could be a big seller while people are stuck at home – ideal for indoor target practice, waking Grandad from his afternoon nap, fun for all  the family sort of thing…

Well maybe not…er, this is going to sound a bit stupid but, you see, I was curious how well they would work – after all they are very light in weight and the old Webley had been so rusty I doubted it packed much of a punch anymore. Curiosity killed the cat they say – but we don’t have a cat so instead I tested it by getting Judy to fire at my backside (fully clothed, of course, nothing pervy here, thank you!) at a suitable squirrel-on-shed-roof range of about fifteen feet.

F*** me that hurt! It didn’t do me any lasting damage but it was that kind of sting that makes you yelp, with the discomfort intensifying over the next  30 seconds. I hobbled about cursing while Judy stood there giggling – a shock reaction, presumably….

I certainly won’t be doing that again but maybe the rats witnessed this bizarre display of human weirdness because since then they haven’t been back, indeed neither have the squirrels thinking about it, so maybe I have created an effective humane (well, ish) Rodent Deterrent. Definitely be wiser selling it as that than an indoor game anyway…

Cheers Rick