I need it to work on fox squirrels. They’re hell on my plums and pears and even apples.
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I met someone years ago that was using Alka-Seltzer mixed with peanut butter to kill mice in a cabin.
Claimed that it worked well.
Since , I have seen claims on the internet,that Baking soda mixed with some thing edible, like oatmeal ?flour ? Peanut butter, etc… would kill mice.
The claim is that small rodents can’t burp ? / or fart.
Baking soda supposedly creates gas in their intestines.
The ingredients in Alka-Seltzer that creates the very active effervescence are “” baking soda and citric acid.””
The ratio in alkaline-seltzer is roughly 2parts baking soda / 1 part citric acid
( Both of which are dirt cheep. )
If the above is true ?
I visualize a experiment, , !
Something like a small pack of flat corn tortillas
With alternating layers of baking soda citric acid and peanut butter.
Such that the ingredients remain separate until chewed .
Could be cut into strips , chunks , rolled up ?
Like pieces of a layer cake .
Think ? …… vinegar / baking soda volcanos inside of mice / voles
May need earplugs ? Safety glasses? For heavy infestations 
Anyhow , something I hope to try,
need some volunteer mice.
Should be pet safe , as long as can burp ,/ , fart ?
( , But you may want to kill them ? .)
@Olpea maybe a good experiment for your mouse farmer friend ?
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Then obviously Mentos and diet soda are the answer to my squirrel problem.
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Sorry if this was already shared. This video shows a super effective and simple approach but also gives me the creeps
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I used to have a Jack Russell mix who was heck on the rats. Then she discovered the joys of eating grubs. And now is a porky/ slow sausage roll of a dog. We wanted Chiweenies again. Superb ratters. But we do not think they would not get along with our LSG dogs. The LSG’s kill everything else bigger then a rat. We also shoot clear problem animals that seem sick. We see a fair amount of psuedo-rabies here in wild animals.
Turned down a beautiful Caucasian Shepard dog. He flat made our big race Pyrenees look puny. But those can be quite hard to rehome. Had to be around 200 pounds. Our big girls run about 150-160.
Much like Anatolians and Kangel’s, Caucasians can be scary animals. A bit too bullheaded and determined to protect too remain under control.
Creeps, no, funny, yes. Johnny dived right in, why not me.
I know this is a very old thread, but using peanut butter with plaster of paris will nulify the effects of PoP. It’s wet. It will not work.You can only use dry ingredients with PoP. No oils or water. Peanut butter is too oily.
I know this is a very old thread, but using peanut butter with plaster of paris will nullify the effects of PoP. It’s wet. It will not work.You can only use dry ingredients with PoP. No oils or water. Peanut butter is too oily. Dry ingredients only and keep it dry.
I’ve used PoP with cornmeal and sugar for norway rats and it worked for me. I cleaned up all their other sources of human food, blocked all holes and used it out doors in the winter and spring. This year I’m late and we’ll see if it works in the summer when they have more food sources.
No, I did not see many rat bodies but could smell them and yes I got rid of them. They’re back now as a neighbor up the hill runs a virtual rat farm by having all sorts of garbage, animal food and bird seed out. He inadvertently feeds the bears too as they break into his shed for food.
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Are you certain of that? The reason I ask is that when I did the experiment, the balls stayed pliable, didn’t harden up. One way to test is to make peanut butter and PoP balls then drop bits of them into water to see if they harden up.
Yup. Pretty darn sure having worked with PoP and things like it. Like 99% sure. I think it will harden very small granuals. If it doesn’t, it would make the PoP impermeable by water and that also would not work. Would digestion remove oil but leave PoP intact? Possible, but again, my bet is on very small granuals which would be passed easily.
AI provides access to research and research can be misleading but so can folk tales. All the research CHAT showed me suggests that PoP is not a helpful rodentcide. Here’s one paper
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21392321/
I then asked CHAT GPT what the least dangerous to other wildlife control method was, and the first suggestion was what I use- spring traps. I place them under platic trays so I only kill voles and chipmunks. I only use the poison indoors and have traps nearby so rodents only eaat the poison when I forget to manage the traps. This method is not too difficult if you are only protecting a couple of acres- I use 6 or 7 trays with 2 or 3 traps under each including a few rat spring traps among the smaller ones for mice all baited with peanuts. I move the trays and traps every 3 or 4 days except trays whose traps have voles and all traps are sprung- those I leave until bait is left alone. Pine voles will only come up for the bait in fall and early spring.
Stop here if you hate AIese- that is AI language.
For an orchard or nursery, the best wildlife-safe strategy is mechanical control plus habitat management, not poison. In a property like yours—woodland edge, lots of predator activity, fruit trees worth protecting—I would avoid routine rodenticide use almost entirely.
For voles, which are usually the serious orchard problem, the most selective combination is:
- Keep vegetation and mulch away from trunks. Voles thrive under dense grass, weeds, and deep mulch. A relatively bare zone around the trunk makes them more exposed to hawks, owls, foxes, etc.
- Use trunk guards, especially on young trees. Fine hardware cloth or purpose-made guards extending a few inches below soil and high enough to remain above anticipated snow are much more reliable than trying to suppress every vole on the property.
- Trap where you actually see active runs. Mouse-size snap traps placed perpendicular to vole runways, trigger in the runway, work well. Penn State specifically recommends covering them with a shingle, board, or box, which both improves vole use and greatly reduces exposure of birds and other wildlife.
- For pine voles, put the trap inside the underground runway rather than aboveground. That is about as species-selective as lethal control gets.
For rats and house mice around buildings, I’d use snap traps inside enclosed trap boxes. You can kill a very large number that way without putting toxic rodents into the food chain.
I would especially avoid the second-generation anticoagulants—brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difenacoum and difethialone. This is where the wildlife issue becomes serious. They persist in the rodent’s tissues, and poisoned rodents can continue eating bait for several days, accumulating far more than a lethal dose. An owl, hawk, fox, bobcat or other predator then eats the rodent. EPA considers these substantially more hazardous from secondary poisoning than older anticoagulants.
Bromethalin isn’t a solution to that problem. It doesn’t bioaccumulate like the second-generation anticoagulants, but it’s an extremely potent neurotoxin with no antidote. Cholecalciferol isn’t benign either. EPA treats both as toxic rodenticides requiring measures to reduce non-target exposure.
Zinc phosphide is more interesting for a commercial orchard emergency, because it kills quickly and doesn’t have the persistent-tissue problem of anticoagulants. But it is acutely toxic to essentially any vertebrate that eats the bait. Penn State therefore recommends putting it directly into vole runs/burrows or protected bait stations rather than leaving it accessible. I wouldn’t regard it as “wildlife safe”; it’s more accurately capable of being used in a way that greatly limits wildlife exposure.
There’s an interesting ecological irony here. Poisoning voles can kill exactly the animals you want controlling the next generation of voles. An active pair of owls or a fox hunting an orchard is essentially providing continual rodent control for free. Killing the predator to knock down this month’s vole population can be a terrible trade.
So for your kind of operation, I would rank the methods roughly:
trunk protection + habitat modification > protected snap traps > carefully placed toxic bait as an emergency measure > broadcast poison.
And I would put second-generation anticoagulants dead last. If your concern is specifically the nursery trees rather than bearing orchard trees, there are a couple of tricks with mulch configuration and trunk guards that can make vole girdling surprisingly uncommon without trying to eliminate the vole population.
I should add that apple may work as bait when pine voles do not go for nuts or other dry bait. By spring their eating habits change- in autumn they mostly eat seeds, then switch to roots and bark in winter and seek wet foods in spring.
All I know from experience is that they tend to come up above ground to peanut baited traps only in autumn. Meadow voles are easier to control and less destructive- except to the bark which can be mechnically protected with plastic spirals. alluminum foil or rat wire. Pine voles will trun a root sytem into a carrot, making young trees wobble and very unstable. They often survive but recovery is slow.
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Hey, that’s really clever Alan! It reminds me of how my friend covers the live-catch trap with cardboard when he is going for groundhogs. There’s got to be a way to do something similar with snap traps for rats that would increase the effectiveness while reducing by-catch.
Thank you for starting this topic.
So far I have found two solutions for destructive pests that omit the need for poisons.
The one is a detector that sprays water to drive off pests.
This works for your outside in the garden problems, (mostly nightly visitors).
And where the above cannot be used - like in a chicken coop, the shed etc.
A PCP rifle will thin pests very quickly.
For nightly pests a night vision scope is awesome, you get models you attach to the existing daytime scope and allows you to see in the dark. For rats, rabbits, etc.
Also, use a hide so they don’t see you.
A few hints with the night vision setup. Do get something that displays on an LCD screen. It is very tiring spending time looking into a scope with the one eye. I have an old Pard with wifi displaying on a phone (app).
Most pests are habitual, they come out at a certain time. Once you know when, you can approach your setup and usually in a few minutes it’s playtime. I have also used a remote detector sounding a buzzer when the rats arrive at night.
Rodents are not scared away when one of their comrades bit the dust, They may run away if you hit one due to the sudden disturbance, but will come back in a few minutes.
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