Following on from a post I read about people not getting certain types of bird in their gardens, I thought I would throw this question out to the general populace and see if I can find an answer.
We live in what's very much an urban area, but are fortunate enough to have a small garden, which my wife has made a lovely place to sit in. We have several species of bird which visit - starlings, blackbirds, bluetits, house sparrows, pigeons, a wren, a robin and even some ducks and magpies.
We encourage these visitors with seed, fatballs and some mealworms - recently we've also had a hedgehog visiting and occasionally even a fox has had a look around.
Unfortunately, we have to be very careful about feeding these visitors because the food is also attractive to long tails. The last thing we want is to attract rats, so when they are in the area (generally the other visitors will let us know there's something amiss), we stop putting food out.
Apart from poison (which we do put out when we notice the long tails), can anyone suggest any other fauna (but not rat) friendly methods of keeping these things at bay?
So far, poison works, but slowly, rat repellers (those electrical things) are useless, we don't want a dog and we get plenty of the neighbourhood cats in as it is.
We live in what's very much an urban area, but are fortunate enough to have a small garden, which my wife has made a lovely place to sit in. We have several species of bird which visit - starlings, blackbirds, bluetits, house sparrows, pigeons, a wren, a robin and even some ducks and magpies.
We encourage these visitors with seed, fatballs and some mealworms - recently we've also had a hedgehog visiting and occasionally even a fox has had a look around.
Unfortunately, we have to be very careful about feeding these visitors because the food is also attractive to long tails. The last thing we want is to attract rats, so when they are in the area (generally the other visitors will let us know there's something amiss), we stop putting food out.
Apart from poison (which we do put out when we notice the long tails), can anyone suggest any other fauna (but not rat) friendly methods of keeping these things at bay?
So far, poison works, but slowly, rat repellers (those electrical things) are useless, we don't want a dog and we get plenty of the neighbourhood cats in as it is.