Thread: What little pesties did you bowl over today?

Good kill there Fb.

Originally Posted by Flyblown

Game changer... Fush!

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Bloody awesome traps those.

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Got to love the head shots!!

Gonna be interesting to see how many I get over the next couple of nights. How big is this population?

What I like about this modern Victor design is that the large yellow trip plate is sized such that a mature and wary rat that carefully reaches onto the bait will likely get mullered right across the skull. The old school designs with the small metal trip plate with the holding bar on the side of the trip plate seemed to get a lot more poor hits. Probably the rat would trip the hammer from an odd angle, and not get killed or paralysed, most likely rear end hits with the front legs off the trap and still useable.

To that end, I always used to wire the old traps onto house piles or similar, because I lost a few which is really annoying. I've been using these ones for a couple of years now, with no trap losses and far fewer activated but empty traps. It's much easier to not have to wire them, you can move them around easily and carefully reach in under the house to get them into all sorts of ratty spots under the house, particularly around the kitchen / bathroom drain - the rats come for the food scraps that get washed down the sink and sit on the grate.

And the saga continues.

I should make this my life's work. Shooting magpies and repeatedly posting almost identical photos of dead birds and a disinterested looking Staffordshire Bull Terrier (he isn't really, believe me). Keep me busy for years that.

There's about as many dead 'uns as this again over the last two days, either torn up by the dog, hung up in the tree, or collared by the harrier before I could get there. It's become a hilarious race between me and the harrier - I swear that bird is sitting on a fence post waiting for the sound of the shot. If a magpie so much as squawks, he's there on the scene, swooping down and grabbing them with his wings spread out like a classic eagle statue. Love the hawks...



On the rat front, since I changed to stinky fush, the nights' tallies have been 8, 4, 1, 2, with a couple of bonus mice. So there's still more rats, and I'll be stoked when I get a full week of zero kills. At that point, I'll change bait again.

I have "pet" Hawks on quite a few of the properties I visit. They are so used to me they don't even fly off when I get to about 15m away and throw them a Rabbit or Pukeko for lunch. Awesome birds.

HOLY SHIT

I’ve never caught one this big before. It escaped the trap, stunned by the hammer, needed a whack on the head with the torch to finish it off. Luckily my lad heard it, the trap in the wood shed is just outside his bedroom window.

Rattus Mungus!

That would even score well on the Morgan scale!

Well my surprise at the rat’s enormity is of course because we normally catch Ship Rats, and this is a Norway Rat, the first I’ve ever caught here. To be honest, I wasn’t really up to speed on the differences, so this morning’s breakfast with the lads was had around the rat as we measured it up. Thinking about it I don’t think I’ve ever caught a Norway Rat anywhere before, and what we’re reading says they are super wary and tougher to trap than the other species.

However this is still a big bastard even by Norway Rat standards. The weight range is typically 200-300g, to a max of 400gr, this is 362g. The body length max is 250mm, this is 235-240 mm. So an interesting and super satisfying result for Pacific Crown mackerel!

1st of the evening . . 204 Ruger No.1 Varmint



hard to tell from this pic how hard the wind was blowing . . it went from challenging down low on the station to fck me its hard to keep your hat on and walk straight.
tried to keep the wind at 6 oclock-ish and made some good shots under 200 yrds.

let the bullets drift with the wind and checked with Strelok . . man i like the 204 for varminting

@Flyblown... dose your wife know you used her....HER cooking scales to wiegh that rat......guys flyblown might be the next pesties to show his mug shot in the line up of pesties knocked off....if she finds out

Originally Posted by Flyblown

Well my surprise at the rat’s enormity is of course because we normally catch Ship Rats, and this is a Norway Rat, the first I’ve ever caught here. To be honest, I wasn’t really up to speed on the differences, so this morning’s breakfast with the lads was had around the rat as we measured it up. Thinking about it I don’t think I’ve ever caught a Norway Rat anywhere before, and what we’re reading says they are super wary and tougher to trap than the other species.

However this is still a big bastard even by Norway Rat standards. The weight range is typically 200-300g, to a max of 400gr, this is 362g. The body length max is 250mm, this is 235-240 mm. So an interesting and super satisfying result for Pacific Crown mackerel!

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Originally Posted by Sideshow

@Flyblown... dose your wife know you used her....HER cooking scales to wiegh that rat......guys flyblown might be the next pesties to show his mug shot in the line up of pesties knocked off....if she finds out

HA HA HA if only you knew mate…

My wife has a nervous breakdown at the mere thought of cooking. All three of us lads sing the same song to her every time she tries to cook… WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT… don’t let the walls cave in on you… Gets a result, every time.



They are my scales. MINE.

She’s good for a packet cake. And a smoothie. Maybe pumpkin fritters… on a good day!

Yesterday was pretty good. Got four feral cats, about 30 rabbits and a couple of pigeons. Today, not so good. Just the one cat.