The Rattle Trap

 

 I have recently done some blogs about packrats, saying that there is nothing ratty about them, but that  with their big eyes and their big ears they are really rather attractive. But then going on to say they are notorious for getting into the wiring of your car where they can cause very expensive damage. Since when they move into your house, usually it is your garage they move into, there is no tolerating them;  you must get rid of them.

We are getting quite efficient at this. The previous owner of our house, knowing I would have problems with them, left with me a Havahart live trap, which catches them easily, and leaves us with no blood on our conscience. We then carry them down to the bottom of our yard and release them, and that seems to be far enough that they won't immediately return. I bait the trap with a spoon-full of peanut butter and their nose is so sharp the smell on the trap never goes away for them, so I never have to bait the trap again after that first time.  I would check around the floor of the garage where they usually came in and look for fresh droppings or other signs they might leave behind, and if I found any trace, I would set out the trap.

Then I thought I would make things even more efficient if I simply set out the trap permanently, then all I would have to do would be to glance at the far side of the garage every day and see if the trap was sprung. The problem  with that is, the longer it stays out, the more unintended creatures end up getting caught in it.

Here, for instance, is what I expect to find when I inspect the trap.

 

Here is what I found instead the other day.

It might be a bit hard for you to make it out. It was hard for me to see what was in the trap, or rather, to believe what I saw. It proved to be a four-and-a-half foot long Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake (the rattle is easily visible in the lower right corner).

 

I have no idea what the snake was doing in the garage, or what prompted it to enter the trap. Perhaps it was attracted, not by peanut-butter, but by the lingering odor of a juicy packrat. Whatever the explanation, there it was. I told Cheryl and she came out and the two of us regarded it grimly, both of us thinking about the difficulty of shaking a packrat out from the complications of the tricky corners of the trap, especially getting the doors open without risking a bite from the rat. From a rattlesnake it would be more than a bite. We decided to leave the snake in overnight while we tried to think about it.

Here is what we came up with.

The trap is quite ingenious. Everything works by gravity, one thing falling making the next thing fall, and it is designed so that each step only works in one direction and so can't be undone. Here is the trap set with the overhead door open. The animal walks in and heads to the rusty-looking baited platform at the end, steps on it which pushes down the hair-trigger which allows the door to swing shut. As the door goes down (in an instant) the sort of mouse-trap like tang (?)  that hangs from the outer edge of the door opening slides down following it until it is caught on the flap in the middle of the door.

 Here is how it looks.

The door, which is hanging down by gravity, is not attached at the bottom, so the animal could easily just push its way out except that the tang fell down (by gravity) and locked itself into that flap.

Now, when we carried the rats we caught down to the bottom of the yard. it was very complicated trying to lift the tang up and hold open the door while we tried to shake the animal out, and that was just what we didn't want to do with a very poisonous and perhaps angry snake.

But suddenly we saw that the solution was right there.  We carried the trap by the handle very gingerly a distance from the house then set it on the ground and used a stick to turn it upsidedown. Cheryl jiggled the tang to stop it from hanging up, and from that side everything that had been down was now up and the tang released itself and the doors all fell open (by un-gravity?) and the snake, just as relieved as we were, went racing out of there, and we never saw it again.