{"id":3778,"date":"2014-08-21T17:12:42","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T17:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3778"},"modified":"2014-08-22T18:03:14","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T18:03:14","slug":"a-rat-eating-the-sweetcorn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3778","title":{"rendered":"A rat eating the sweetcorn"},"content":{"rendered":"

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:<\/p>\n

\"rat<\/a><\/p>\n

This is an infra-red shot taken by the wildlife camera as it was getting quite dark.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n

\"rat<\/a><\/p>\n

You can see it climbing the middle plant. Here is an enlargement:<\/p>\n

\"rat<\/a><\/p>\n

So it wasn’t squirrels. This shows one of the damaged cobs:<\/p>\n

\"damaged<\/a><\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\"w14_103546p1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It had a good look around but avoided both the trap and poison – rats are quite intelligent creatures…<\/p>\n

But rats were not the only rodents about:<\/p>\n

\"mouse<\/a><\/p>\n

Here we see a small mouse inspecting the rat trap. It then went in for a sweetcorn snack:<\/p>\n

\"mouse<\/a><\/p>\n

It didn’t set the trap off! It is amazing what goes on in the garden at night.<\/p>\n

These are enlargements of the originals so you can see the detail, hence the graininess.<\/p>\n

These photos can be seen in the ‘pests’ section of the gardening gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 … Continue reading “A rat eating the sweetcorn”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,78,67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-garden","category-night","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3778"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3789,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778\/revisions\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}