A rat eating the sweetcorn

This week our sweetcorn was just about ready for harvesting. However, some of the cobs had been damaged by a pest – we suspected squirrels. So, one evening, I set up my wildlife camera to see what was happening:

rat at base of sweetcorn

This is an infra-red shot taken by the wildlife camera as it was getting quite dark.  This shows a rat at the base of the middle sweetcorn (you can see the eye glowing in the illumination). I was then surprised to see the rat shinning up the plant:

rat shinning up sweetcorn

You can see it climbing the middle plant. Here is an enlargement:

rat climbing enlargement

So it wasn’t squirrels. This shows one of the damaged cobs:

damaged sweetcorn

Completely stripped! We removed all the plants that day and set a trap and poison. I set the camera up again to see what the rat did:

w14_103546p1

It had a good look around but avoided both the trap and poison – rats are quite intelligent creatures…

But rats were not the only rodents about:

mouse inspecting a rat trap

Here we see a small mouse inspecting the rat trap. It then went in for a sweetcorn snack:

mouse in rat trap

It didn’t set the trap off! It is amazing what goes on in the garden at night.

These are enlargements of the originals so you can see the detail, hence the graininess.

These photos can be seen in the ‘pests’ section of the gardening gallery.

Author: Paul L.G. Morris

I am an amateur photographer whose photography is mostly of gardens, nature and the rural environment. My specialities are close-ups, panoramic views, or a combination of both that I call 'Nearscapes'. I work mostly for my own interest having closed my business PM Studios Ltd.