There were rats, big as blooming cats

I know Alan will sympathise...

We have rats. At least I presume they're rats, haven't seen them yet, but I have seen their signs.

Actually, that's not true, Wilma found a dead rat last month. It was really big too!

Their sign (RatsRUS - no just joking), include hundreds of macadamia nuts with little holes gnawed in their shells, and gnawed apples, and avacadoes... and actually, I owe the birds an apology, I thought it was them pecking at the avacadoes. Now I think its the rats.

And in our "tack room", whatever that is (horsey people will know), which is traditionally where (before the drying room was built) nuts were left to dry, and where I had left 3 buckets of nuts, our practise run which I have kept separate from the commercial crop, there were nutshells all over the place, up high in recesses in the wall, down low in the very difficult to get corner behind the spa pool... the rats have been helping themselves!

And so I took those 3 buckets, and I dried the nuts in the ovens (over-dried them actually, I have probably ruined them, but anyway, they were the practise run), and hung them in an onion bag with last year's crop.

I also tripped down to Mitre 10 & bought a truckload of ratbait, some of it is stationed out in the orchard now, in a pet proof plastic thing, some of it is pushed into hard-to-get-at places in the tack room & stables.

War is declared on a big scale.

I suspect this will be an ongoing war & goodness knows what else in the way of pests will come to well, pester me. The carbaryl (wasp poison) in the shed may be a bit of a clue.

Oh, and explorers this weekend, found the legendary source of Lake SunnyO. Yes, about 18 inches down in the ground underneath the avacado tree is a T intersection in the white PVC piping that runs through much of our property, which has lost its tail. A plumber will have to be summoned.

BTW, somewhere I have photos, when I come across the camera again, in due course, I will upload them.