Rats in the compost pens.

Is it an urban myth, that we are never more than twenty feet away from a rat?

Or it is true?

Well, I don't know the answer to that one, although I suspect that the law of averages must come into it at some point: everyone who lives in a city or town which has sewers must, by definition, be less than 20' away from rats at all times, because they live in sewers. And as there are many, many more people living in cities in towns than living in rural areas, then on average, yes, we must "all" live within a few yards of rats, pretty much all the time.

And most of us just don't care - after all, when was the last time you went down a sewer?

(Actually, true story, I live at the downhill end of the sewer which serves my house and those of my neighbours: and some of the uphill ones are the sort of BRAINLESS and STUPID and SELFISH people who put things down their toilets. Things other than the usual and expected items, that is. So when the sewer blocks up, I, being downhill, get to know about it first. 

So I have my own set of drain rods, and about once a year, I have to rod out the drains, because they are blocked by the junk which those BRAINLESS and STUPID and SELFISH people uphill, put down their loos. 

I am talking about wet wipes, of course: great wodges of them, which jam the pipes up nicely. But also - picking a list at random, from past rodding experiences, fag butts, disposable nappies, cotton buds, banana peel, whole grapes - I mean, who puts whole grapes down the loo? You can see why I revert to capitals, can't you?

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes...)

Rats.

Right.

Those of us with compost pens probably also have rats, or small mammalian vermin of various sorts, because even if we do the thing properly, and don't ever put meat, table scraps, or plate scrapings onto our compost pens, rats and other small vermin will still enjoy tunnelling into it, because it will sit there undisturbed for six months or more, while we wait for it to rot down. 

And rats just love being undisturbed.

So, why am I talking about rats today, in particular?

Answer: today I dug out a compost pen, because Mrs Client wanted to use some of it on the roses, and the rest was to go onto the "no-dig" vegetable beds of Mr Client. 

Here's the compost pen in question:

This photo was taken the day I opened it up, at the end of last year, and you can see how much it has rotted down, bearing in mind that it was full to overflowing when we finally decided to close it off, and start filling the next one in sequence.

And what did I find when I got to the bottom of it?

 

A skull...... just the one, nothing else.

I'm pretty sure this is Rattus norvegicus, or common rat.

Although I have to admit, it's a bit bigger than I would have expected - that's a 3" fence post, which gives you some idea of scale.

I often find skulls of small mammals around gardens, but they are usually rather smaller than this one.

So maybe it was an old, old rat... whatever the history of it, it died in the compost bin and decomposed. 

There were the remains of some tunnels through the compost, towards the back: again, nothing unusual, I often find tunnels when turning out compost pens. Luckily, I rarely see the residents: probably the noise and disturbance of me digging them out gives them sufficient warning to scarper.

Although there was that time that I was shovelling a huge heap of topsoil which had been sitting on the Client's drive for about two months... I didn't realise that some bunnies had taken up residence, until I had dug in as far as their tunnelling, at which point I suddenly had one bunny shooting off to my left, one to my right, and one shot straight between my ankles. A bit like the Red Arrows, but without the smoke.

Anyway, getting back to my dead rat: I'm not worried about the compost - it's just fish, blood and bone, but without the fish, when you think about it, so I'm sure it will be good for the veg patch.

 

 

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