Timber Rats by Leslie Littell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 30, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 34.

Timber Rats

By Leslie Littell

MR. BURDICK, who lives at this place, has had quite an experience with timber rats, a reddish gray rat, which took up their abode in his old storehouse.

They built their nest on the floor up-stairs. It was three or four feet high, and made out of cornstalks, cobs, husks, bottles, broken dishes, berry crates, berry boxes, pieces of boards, bolts, tops, pieces of iron, cotton, carpet-rags, old clothing, burdock leaves, papers, magazines, planes, whipple-trees, old shoes, and other old rubbish, about a wagon-load in all.

All the cow-peas two girls picked in one afternoon were carried in one night up-stairs and piled in a heap by the rats. They shelled enough peas to fill a number of berry boxes and covered them with cotton. They gathered nearly all the peaches from two cling peach-trees, and piled them on a shelf in the upper part of the smoke-house to dry.

They shelled corn, and piled a peck of it on the mantel-shelf, and covered it with cotton and pea shucks. They covered a barrel of peas with cotton to hide them.

These rats catch chickens, destroy grain, cut and clothing to pieces, and are a general nuisance. They build their nests in old houses, and in caves, and under brush piles in the woods. They are increasing so fast that every one is waging war on them; but it is a continual warfare, for as soon as one family is exterminated another comes and takes possession.

As a general rule you can not catch them in a trap. They cover it three or four inches deep with rubbish. Surely the last-day pests are here.

Hardy, Arkansas. LESLIE LITTELL.