Rats vs rats
Rodger Whitlock (Mon, 06 Sep 2004 09:10:12 PDT)
On 3 Sep 04 at 9:09, Jane McGary wrote:
The big problem in bulbs is field mice and voles... now [that Koshka
the omnivoroous rat-killing dog] has died... I'm going to contact a
pest control company to see what I can get against these rodents,
so I can grow crocuses in the borders again, and not have to cover
my most precious pots of crocuses with wire mesh caps in the bulb
frames.
A lost cause. A veritable King Canute commanding the tide to not come
in.
The difficulty being that for every field mouse or vole you kill,
there are a million more on the circumjacent lands, waiting to move
in and fill the vacancy.
Now that I've rained on your parade, let me ask an important
question with respect to your anti-field-mouse-and-vole wire mesh
pot-caps: what mesh size?
Actually things aren't *quite* as grim as I make them out to be.
Consider the lowly slug. I've read that if you go out at night and
sedulously collect and destroy them by flashlight, after five years
your slug population will start to go down. You will have become a
major predator of sorts.
It's easy to imagine that a similar kind of population dynamic would
occur with fm&v's. Nuke them thoroughly and frequently and eventually
the population will decline, as your property becomes a kind of
black hole: anything reaching its boundary just disappears. Just how
far the influence of the black hole would extend is anybody's
guess.
It might be well worth the effort to find out if anyone has estimated
the fm&v population per acre in your area (a favorite project for
undergraduat biology majors) so as to get a grip on the actual
numbers involved instead of whistling in the dark.
Good luck!
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate
on beautiful Vancouver Island