How Can You Confirm Rat Activity Around a Property in Huntingdon?

This is the outdoor equivalent of a smear mark, and it is the reason a survey spends as much time on the garden as on the building.

What a Run Looks Like

• A flattened track through grass or vegetation, usually four to eight centimetres wide, worn enough to be visible in daylight
• It follows an edge — a wall, a fence line, a kerb, the side of a shed. Rats avoid open ground
• It connects two things: harbourage at one end, food or an entry point at the other
• Bare or shiny soil where it crosses a hard surface
• A gap worn under a fence, at the same point every time
• Droppings along it, particularly where it passes cover

Where to Walk

1. The boundary, the whole way round, both sides of the fence line where you can.
2. The base of every wall, including outbuildings.
3. Along and under decking, and around any raised structure.
4. Between the bins and the building, which is the commonest run of all.
5. Around the compost, the feeder and any animal housing.
6. To and from the drainage covers.
7. Through dense cover, ivy, brambles and long grass, parting it rather than looking at the top.

Tracks

In soft ground, mud, dust or a light covering of snow you may find actual prints. A rat leaves a four-toed front print and a five-toed hind print, and frequently a continuous drag line from the tail between them. That drag line is the giveaway, and it is what separates it from most other things making prints in a garden.

What the Route Tells You

Then Follow It to Both Ends

A run is only half a piece of information. Where it starts and where it finishes is the whole of it — one end is what is feeding them and the other is where they live, and dealing with either changes the situation permanently in a way that a treatment on its own does not.