Rats and their Aftermath

Readers with delicate stomachs should maybe eat before reading today's blog.

What is worse than rats nesting in the roof?  Hmmmm.

Regular readers willl know we've had rats nesting in the roof for the last few weeks.  The first signs were innocent enough. Sitting having evening sundowners looking at out the garden, and noting either one very assiduous rat trotting back and forth across the step or, more likely, one rat and his friends and relations in single file maybe each carrying the wearwithall to build a nest.

Next door's dogs killed the local mongeese a few months ago, and these rats seemed smart enough to dodge the kites and any potential snakes. We sought for rats nests in the flower beds, hoping to persuade them away from the house. Found and evicted two nests.

Then as the rains started the everyday sounds at home changed.  The thundering of tiny feet wearing tap shoes overhead.  Rats had found a way into the roof, and were enjoying the dry.

The insect repellent people came. Rather ineffectually, bringing only three traps and no ladder to help set them. They were very keen to resort to poison.  And I was rather worried a rat would die in an inaccessible place.  So I won out, and we placed the traps.  And for two weeks of daily checks, those rats avoided them.

We rethought, I capitulated, we set poison away from the house (in the hope that a dying rat wouldn't make it up to the roof again.)  We started finding dead rats. Two in the roof of the garage. One on the roof of the house. Several in the garden. One even in the trap in the roof (plus a third and fourth nest there too).

And then a pungent smell in the living room.   Pungent, dead rat-like and inaccessible. We have a great metal sheet on the roof under the tiles to keep the rain out. And the rat had managed to die under this.  So we opened the windows and tried to ignore it.  Ronald the gardener reckoned it would be around three days before the smell went.  In the event it was really only one day.

Until today. When we came in to breakfast to find small white squirmy things on the floor.  I hoped they were more, smaller termite larvae. But was soon informed better. Maggots. From the dead rat in the roof. Now falling through the crack in the ceiling onto the living room floor.  Raining maggots. Hundreds of them by 11am.  And as the day got hotter, they got more active, squirming, wriggling their way along the parquet floor before we could sweep them up.  The stuff of nightmares.

Thank you thank you, by 2pm a host of four fundis came to take the tiles off the roof, to remove the metal sheet, to remove the rat. In fact two dead rats and a (fifth) nest in the roof.  And tonight though there's still the occasional gentle plop of a lone maggot falling, by and large they've gone. (And I've gone too, I'm not sitting in the living room till the last maggot is eradicated.)

As I gibbered at friends today, others have shared their stories. Of the rat which died in the car, and for which the charge to find, extract and put right the damage, came to over £1000.  Rats dead in drains, in wood piles, under floorboards.  Rats stealing chocolate from bedside tables. Uggghhh. But none worse than maggots raining into your living room.