woodrats

-T: Yesterday we got ahold of some bigger live traps from the RMBL office, and baited them and set both of them in likely rat locations; one we put up on in front of the hole we knew woodrat A was using to get in the cabin, in the same spot as where we had put the much smaller Sherman trap. The other one we put near where woodrat B disappeared when we chased it the night before last, in the upstairs spare bedroom. We used peanut butter and oats, with spinach stuck on top. Apparently woodrats are mostly vegetation browsers, so we thought the spinach might be a nice touch.

The trap upstairs in the spare bedroom still hasn't had any activity, but the same rat that came back the first two times got himself caught for a third time early yesterday evening! This time, we had a plan. We decided to keep him overnight and them drop him off at the trail head four miles away from Gothic - a fairly daunting distance for a rat, we hope. Below, you can see him in his live trap cage. I gave him carrots too, which he took and piled in the corner you can see there.
He wasn't all that crazy about being in the cage, and at first we didn't have a vehicle until Wednesday, so I decided to try to make him a bigger and more comfortable cage using a garbage can and some racks from the toaster oven. However, he decided that escaping was more fun than being a good well behaved wood rat, so we had a fun five minutes where he was cornered in the hobby room but not running back into the live trap. You can see him in the corner here - he's really cute.


We used a broom to chase him back into a live trap, and then decided he could just sit and think about what he had done, as he was a very naughty rat. As it turned out, Cody (another RMBL workerperson) was free and said he could drive the rat to the trailhead and release him as he went back into town, so this afternoon we said goodbye to woodrat A. Woodrat B is still somewhere in the cabin, but we're prepared for him now.

And, in conclusion, here is a picture of a mama mule deer and a baby mule deer, right in front of our cabin (the cabin in the picture is across from us, it's named Galena).