"There's a Rat in My Kitchen"

Anyone remember that old UB40 song? Well, we sort of had a similar problem of our own, although thankfully not in our kitchen.

A while back, the girls made a big bird feeder out of large pine cones and bird seed. It may have been over the winter, because it was sitting on top of the refrigerator in our garage, wrapped in tinfoil, waiting for the spring/summer for the birds to come out. Late last week a couple of times as I went out into the garage and flipped on the lights, I heard some rustling in that general vicinity, and I became wary of what might be there behind our camp chairs, beach equipment, and other odds and ends. So I moved all the stuff, and realized the bird feed was all over the place, and there was definitely a large hole chewed in the tin foil ... not a good sign. And yep, there were droppings. What I wasn't sure about was whether they were still in there, or whether they had just been coming in from the outside when the garage door was open, so I cleaned everything up, threw away the bird feeder, and hoped that was the end of it. Next morning, there were more droppings, so it was war. I went and bought a pack of mouse traps, and that night I set three traps with generous globs of peanut butter. I placed them wherever we found droppings - one on the floor, one on top of the fridge, and one on a wire shelf above the fridge. In the morning, the first thing I noticed was the traps on the shelf and the fridge were no longer there. As I looked on the side of the fridge, there were two of the three traps, and a dead rat (small, but definitely larger than a mouse) in one. [WARNING: GRAPHIC - and it was caught in the trap only by its eyeball... gross...] So I cleaned everything up and although I vaguely wondered where the third trap was (looking around but not seeing it), I figured we were good, we caught the varmint, and that was that. So a day or so later, I noticed a strange odor coming from the back of the fridge, and I remembered that there had been a third trap. So of course I pulled everything out, and found our dead rat's buddy - dead rat #2, stuck firmly in the third trap, which had fallen into the back of the fridge. Again, not a pretty sight (or smell!), but once we got that taken care of, I really think the problem has been solved.