I’ve recently tried adding some beef dripping - no good. Added rolled oats - a bit more interest.
Last week added some chocolate sprinkles to Pam’s smooth peanut butter - 7 rats caught in 23 traps!! Seemed to work really well so will stick with that for a while until they loose interest.
Several baits cleaned (T-Rex traps) out but slug/snail trails around traps but most spotlessly clean and empty and still set!
That sounds like chocolate sprinkles and smooth PB well worth a try! Thanks Max
Usually, the mouse clears the bait out.
I put some mouse traps in the tunnel box as well.
Catch a lot of mice.
By removing the mice, the bait stays there longer for the rat to come across it.
How long have you tried drippings?
I recommend trying my experiment with marbles, which has been extremely effective.
Good luck.
Rats also love to scavenge mice, so that will keep them coming back for more.
Guys and gals,
With all of this stuff, what we need to do is more like a trial. So, for instance if you have 20 traps, bait every second one with the new lure you want to try and the others with what you’ve been using for a while.
Then see what the difference is.
Because if you change all 20 to to a new lure and catch a bunch of rats, you don’t know if you would have caught them anyway, using your original lure. Perhaps there were just more around that week? Perhaps a litter or 2 dispersed and you caught them?
Do others think this is the way to go?
I absolutely think that that’s the way to go.
Chocolate sprinkles are 70% sugar.
Rats have receptors on their tongues and soft palate that sugar triggers. Their brains register the sugar hit as a good food sourse.
I add sugar to all the lures I make. The odours draws them in and then the sugar registers with their brain its a high calorific food worth eating.
Then they die.
At this time of year, mold can colonize lures quickly, especially peanut butter (in my experience). In winter, I primarily use fat in my snap traps, either tallow or drippings, because they’re waterproof and mold-resistant, because they don’t contain water. Pure fat is irresistible to rodents, because it’s such a concentrated source of energy, which is very important to predators in winter, when food supplies are low.
If you intend to keep using PB, Goodnature’s lures are waterproof and mold resistant. Just give the PB a smear or dab of one of the lures (Meat Lovers’ is my favourite). They’re also a good way to lure predators to your traps, because you can put samples of the lure on objects nearby and on the outside of tunnels.
A dry lure is another option. Cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc. are really dry, so they give the PB a bit of a weather shield. Predators will have no trouble smelling the PB underneath a dry lure, and the combination of the dry lure and the base lure may make traps more attractive than PB on its own.
Also, when I’ve given lures a coating with a dry lure, the insects here often have a hard time detecting the base lure, probably because it’s harder to smell. Luckily, I don’t have any problems with slugs or snails interfering with my lures, but I doubt that they would like to travel across a very dry surface that sticks to them. I’d love to find out if I’m right or wrong about this.
Good luck!