What Is This Critter?
- Thread starter MHUNT
- Start date
While I was sheep hunting one moved into my engine compartment,ate part of the hood and firewall insulation and chewed off two wires for my fuel injection system.The damage totalled $700.Now I take a box of mothballs on every hunt and scatter them in the engine compartment and around the wheels.Haven't had a problem since.
They're very good at picking up every cigarette butt in the campground and stuffing them between them against the exhaust manifold. I now always check under the hood if my vehicles been parked in the bush for a while.
Salty said:They like to steal shinny stuff and bring it back to their nest. Not a good idea to leave keys laying aroundAnd ya they may be cute but they make one stinky freaking mess!
I can think of quite a few rifle ranges that could use them to pick up all the .22 brass that gets left around.
OK that settles it. It's a pack rat. I like the idea about the moth balls. I'll add them to the list of camp supplies... We had one do a number on our truck while on an elk hunt 2 years ago. It only took a roll of electrical tape and some time spent to fix the damage. As to what happened to this cute little fella... At about this point one of my hunting buddies leaned over my shoulder and smacked him with a piece of fire wood. Crude but effective...Foot note; my truck was running like crap for the last couple of days so my mechanic buddy replaced the plug wires. Seems the old ones had been chewed by something. Go figure.
You know, you can use packrats as pretty effective little guys for cleaning up your work areas. We had a packrat trying to move in all over the place, so we made him a nest in the back of our woodshed replete with an old birdhouse, nest, and lots of shiny stuff. He moved right in and now we can just go out every couple of months and see what the new rat has found that we like. Figure as long as we cant keep them out, may as well know where all our stuff is going.
