Rat Droppings or Mouse Droppings? How to Tell the Difference in Wisbech

People send us pictures of droppings every week and we can usually answer straight away. When we cannot, it is nearly always for the same handful of reasons, all of them easy to avoid.

The Four Things That Make a Photograph Usable

1. Something for scale, in the same shot. A coin, a pencil, a ruler, a key. Without it, a photograph of a dropping is a photograph of a dark shape and size is the whole question.
2. Good light. Use the torch on the phone from the side rather than straight on — side lighting shows the shape and whether the surface is shiny or dull.
3. Close, but focused. Get as near as the phone will focus, then take one step back. A blurred close-up tells us less than a sharp shot from six inches.
4. A second picture of the surroundings. Where they are matters as much as what they are — a line along a wall says something different from a scatter through a cupboard.

What Else to Send

• Any gnawing you have found, photographed the same way
• The hole or gap, if you have found one
• Anything outdoors — a burrow, a run through vegetation
• A note of the times you hear noise, and roughly where in the building
• Whether it is a loft, a kitchen, a garage or outdoors, because that changes what is likely

What We Can and Cannot Tell You From a Picture

Please Do Not Handle Them

There is no need to pick anything up to photograph it. If you do have to move something, wear gloves, cover any cuts, and wash your hands properly afterwards — rats carry organisms that can cause illness, and leptospirosis is the one usually named.

And Leave the Rest Where They Are

Photograph, then leave them. The distribution is the map of where the activity runs, and it is what decides where a treatment goes. Clearing up before anybody has looked is the commonest thing that makes a first visit less useful than it should be.

Where a photograph does not settle it, a pest inspection and survey is a fixed cost and identifies what is present, the extent and the access points before you commit to a treatment.