Pack Rats are everywhere! When they create their dens far from homes, cars, and businesses, they happily multiply and live out their lives. They are, however, a favorite prey of raptors, reptiles, and other predators like Ringtail, Foxes, Skunks, and an occasional Coyote. If they take up residence in close proximity to your home or business, things change and they begin to affect you and they can be a real nuisance.
The name Pack Rat actually covers a number of different species of “Wood Rats,” which live in the southwest. These little guys build nests and dens in almost anything-rocks, around the roots of Prickly Pear and Agave cactus, your car engine, your grill, in your shed, in your attic, the walls of your home, or behind a storage bin on your patio. You often discover them when you come across a debris pile, called midden, that can contain Cholla sections, Prickly Pear “ears,” or when you try to start a car/truck that has sat outside for some time and it refuses to start. (There are lots of stories in Tucson and surrounding areas of $1000+ expenditures to repair the wires of a truck or car that has had Pack Rat damage, a TV service call to investigate a cable outage, or a sprinkler hose leak-all associated with these "rats.")
One of the interesting things I have learned about Pack Rats, in addition to their behavior, and their destructive/nuisance nature, is their value to botanists who research desert/arid plant life over long time periods. They are called paleobotanists. Packrats will urinate on their midden. The urine crystallizes and hardens into a substance called amberat. The amberat, in its hardened form and with the dry conditions in Arizona, actually creates a historical record which, over time, has allowed paleobotanists to look through the contents of the midden and determine what the vegetation was around the time the den was constructed and material gathered to construct the den-kind of a self contained time capsule, if you will.
For the most part, the majority of my Pack Rat calls are related to customer sites where the Pack Rats have become a nuisance. What customers report are noises in their attic, piles of debris around the base of cactus, their sheds, and holes under the house stuffed with Cholla sections, etc. Since Pack Rats are, for the most part, nocturnal, unless you surprise one, you will see their midden, but not the rat. Here is a little fellow that was curious enough, over night, to find himself in my trap.
Here is a picture of where he was living.
Here is a picture of the midden that he collected to surround his den.
What is almost as annoying as having Pack Rats in and around your business and home, is knowing that trapping and removing a Pack Rat from your property is not the end of the story. Pack Rats are opportunists and, when a den is vacated-after its resident is trapped, another Pack Rat will happily take up residence in that same den, making it larger and adding its own midden.
The best approach to getting rid of a Pack Rat, and subsequent residents of the den/nest you find, is to give 1st Response Wildlife a call and, along with my trapping service, I can remove the midden and treat the area so that other Pack Rats are discouraged from taking up residence in the same place. If I trap Pack Rats in your attic or walls, similarly, the entrance holes must be plugged to keep others out.
Thanks, Wildman Josh :)
Josh's Cell (24/7 Hours): 520-260-9517
Josh Waling is a humane Licensed Animal Trapper who catches and releases wildlife, removing animals including bobcats (lince), snakes, rattlesnakes (serpiente de cascabel), raccoons (mapache), pack rats, gila monsters (monstruos de gila), rabbits (canejo), owls, bats, squirrels (ardilla), coatimundi (gato solo), skunks (mofeta), exotics, and domestic cats and dogs. He delivers service that is professional and fast and he is available 24/7. Give him a call the next time you hear unusual noises in the attic or crawl spaces in your home or if you see wildlife eating your vegetation, creating nests, and raising their young too close to your pets or children. 520-260-9517 Thanks!
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