During the last week I’ve been occupying myself with three main tasks:
1. Getting my work sorted before our supervisor arrives
2. The occasional night walk with Rachel and Ridzwan or helping Joao with his trapping
3. Rat Protection
Although my interests lie in conservation it’s not protection of the rat that I’m concerned with at the moment. There’s one particularly evil rat that has now munched its way through two pairs of trousers, two shirts, three bags, a toothbrush and an inflatable kangaroo. And just to torment me a little more he spends all night either running around my room or gnawing at my door.
The first stage of Operation Rat Attack involved merely covering the hole in my door with gaffa tape. This has been successful for some time now, but for some reason the rat is on a real mission to enter my room. Since the tape ceased to be of any use when we returned, and having been severely annoyed at the loss of my monkey bag, I decided it was time for drastic action. Paper, cardboard, tape and wood are obviously no match for my attacker so I set off on a hunt for something metal. If nothing else it’ll give him toothache if he insists on chewing at my door. The only moveable metal item I could find was a water bottle left by Verity after the field course; other options included the sink and the metal pipe running down the outside of the house if I were able to detach them from the wall. A highly technical application of tape and a precise positioning of the bottle to cover the inside of the hole followed by further tape application would, I hoped, stop our rodent friend from entering my room. I took it a step further by attaching a piece of string to the back of my door which could be hooked up to a bungee cord outside my room to keep the door shut. As I don’t have a key for my door, the rat had been entering whilst we were at dinner and causing havoc before the lights even went out. All of this worked wonders. However a new problem arose: by keeping the rat out of my room it then focussed all of its energies on trying to gnaw its way through my defences, resulting in my average sleeping time reducing significantly. My solutions to this problem included throwing things at the door whenever the chewing began and spraying the door with mosquito repellent in the hopes that it also repelled rodents. No such luck.
Eventually I gave in and set a trap. I closed my door and locked it from the inside. Hearing an almighty ‘clunk’ I tried to unlock my door, only to find that the locking mechanism had come unattached from the locky-unlock-knob thing (technical term). So I was now locked inside my room. Fortunately I had my nifty multi-tool to hand and after some fiddling with various implements I managed to dislodge the lock with the pliers. Wondering how I could have such an unlucky door I propped a chair up against it and retired to bed. The rat didn’t wait long and after only seven minutes I heard the trap spring shut. I tried to make him apologise for destroying everything and keeping me awake but he just carried on sniffing around his cell looking slightly confused. At least he had an oil palm kernel to munch on until morning. Morning came and the rat was released a little way from the field centre... I now look forward to a good night’s sleep!
The Prisoner of War
The Rat-Prevention Mechanism: Mark II
My travelling shirt...
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