Rats in the Garden: Decking, Compost and Bird Feeders
Most rat problems indoors started outdoors. The garden stage is the easy one to deal with, and it is the one most people wait through.
What is actually feeding them
Rats need food, water and cover, and a typical garden supplies all three without anybody intending it.
The reliable food sources, in the order we find them:
- Spillage under bird feeders — comfortably the most common
- Compost heaps containing cooked food, meat or bread
- Bin stores where bags sit on the ground rather than in a bin
- Fallen fruit left under trees
- Chicken and pet feed stored in bags in a shed
- Dog mess left on the lawn, which rats will use
None of that means anything has been done wrong. It means there is a reason, and reasons can be removed.
Cover is the other half
Food without cover does not hold a population. What holds them is somewhere to be during the day, close enough to the food to be worth it.
Decking with a void underneath is the classic. So is a shed or summerhouse standing on a frame with a gap beneath, a log store against a wall, dense ground-level planting along a fence, and a garden building with a rotten corner.
If you want one thing to check, look under the decking. It is dark, dry, sheltered, inaccessible to anything larger, and usually within a few metres of a bird feeder.
Dealing with it before it gets indoors
The sequence that works: remove or manage the food, reduce the cover, then treat if there is still a population, then close the ground-level routes into the house so the next lot cannot follow.
Doing it in the other order — baiting while a feeder keeps spilling into the same border — is how people end up on a maintenance contract they did not need.
You rarely have to stop feeding the birds. A feeder with a tray, sited away from cover, with what falls cleared up, is a different proposition from an open feeder over a shrub border.
Before you book
Quick Answers
Do I have to stop feeding the birds?
Usually not. A feeder with a catch tray, positioned away from cover, with spillage cleared, is a much smaller draw than an open feeder over a border. It is the spillage and the cover together that make it worth a rat’s while.
Is it worth treating if they are only outside?
Yes, and it is the cheapest point to do it. Rats establish outside and work inwards, so the garden stage is the easy one.
Book a Rat Control Visit
Rats in the loft, the kitchen, the garden or the premises — tell us what you have seen and where.
Get in touch
Book a Rat Control Visit
Tell us what you have seen or heard and roughly where. If it is urgent, ring instead — the phone is faster.
- Phone
- 01908 465226
- Message us on WhatsApp
- sales@miltonkeynespestcontroller.co.uk
- Milton Keynes Pest Controller Service
- Address
- South Row
Milton Keynes
MK9 3DQ - Covering
- Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and parts of Hertfordshire