Traps

Messages binged on Friday morning..."can you come out and do the traps in 15 mins?"

Scully was pleased. Excited. Giving forth all sorts of vocalizations that generally denote incitement, encouragement and "c'mon let's get going".

Only the day before I had reminded Mr B to add a jar of cheap peanut butter to the groceries. My plan was to supplement the bait - which is normally pieces of rabbit, a bait that appeals to stoats - with some peanut butter to encourage rats to explore the traps.

Scully is unreasonably fond of the pieces of rotting bait that we throw away as we clear each trap and reset it. She is well enough behaved to understand a firm 'NO' but I suspect her GPS marker clicks at every place there is discarded old bait. She did attempt once or twice to lick the peanut butter smearing-stick when I wasn't paying attention to her manoeuvres

Next day on our walk I caught her rolling in something.... "what's that on your fur?"  Oh yuck, you smell of rotting meat. She was less enthusiastic about being pushed into the stream and bathed.

A bit further along we found a nice fresh rat in one of the peanut butter traps. Today we set off early, while there was still frost on the ground, recovered said rat and reset the trap, then carried the rat up the hill and used it as bait in one of the stoat traps. 

Scully, the terrier, when presented with the rat, approached it cautiously eventually pressing her nose carefully against its fur, pronounced it dead and immediately lost all interest.

We'll peer into the traps again on our walk tomorrow....