This week our sweetcorn was just about ready for harvesting. However, some of the cobs had been damaged by a pest – we suspected squirrels. So, one evening, I set up my wildlife camera to see what was happening:
This is an infra-red shot taken by the wildlife camera as it was getting quite dark. This shows a rat at the base of the middle sweetcorn (you can see the eye glowing in the illumination). I was then surprised to see the rat shinning up the plant:
You can see it climbing the middle plant. Here is an enlargement:
So it wasn’t squirrels. This shows one of the damaged cobs:
Completely stripped! We removed all the plants that day and set a trap and poison. I set the camera up again to see what the rat did:
It had a good look around but avoided both the trap and poison – rats are quite intelligent creatures…
But rats were not the only rodents about:
Here we see a small mouse inspecting the rat trap. It then went in for a sweetcorn snack:
It didn’t set the trap off! It is amazing what goes on in the garden at night.
These are enlargements of the originals so you can see the detail, hence the graininess.
These photos can be seen in the ‘pests’ section of the gardening gallery.