4/6-8/04 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:50. It was sunny, 60 degrees, and calm. Beautiful. After moving in and having lunch, I checked the building and found that the flap on the rodent valve was open. I hoped that meant that the pack rat I had left in the building last week had exited through the valve. Hope springs eternal.

I closed the flap putting a peanut at the far end of it, set the trap on the main floor, and then rigged a rope and pulley outside to release the trap if I catch another pack rat. Rather than release him and watch him run behind the building like I had done all the other times, the next time I wanted to be on the high rock behind the building and use the rope rigging to lift the trap off. That way, when he ran behind the building, I would be in a position to watch to see where he went. Hopefully, I could see how he got back into the building. I am learning that you have to always be thinking if you hope to outsmart a pack rat.

I sanded all the logs that are due for another coat of varnish and then went up to the spring. Both screens needed replacing and this was an ideal time to replace the outside one. I cleaned out the debris on the outside of the springbox and then put a new screen over the end of the overflow pipe. Then I went up to check on the little tree I had transplanted. The winter snow had bent the chicken wire down onto the tree and had it bent over a little. I straightened the wire up so that it cleared the tree all around and would protect it from the deer. It looks like the tree is pretty healthy.

On Wednesday morning the rodent valve flap was down again. I took that as a good sign. Then, to my surprise, I discovered that the peanut on the main floor was still there and the bait in the trap was untouched. The trap was still set. Did I dare hope that the critter had gone out the pipe and wasn't able to get back in the building? Naaaah. I've been fooled too many times before.

I went to work planing, scraping, gouging, and sanding logs. I did the three logs between the windows between Grid C and D, one course of the short logs at Grid B, C, and D, parts of the Grid C and D PSLs, and the Grid E purlin between the southwest wall and the loft. I had to rig some ad hoc scaffolding between the loft and the scaffold tower in order to reach all of the purlin.

On Thursday morning, the flap was still closed and the peanuts and the trap on the main floor were still untouched. Now my hopes really were raised. If I really have succeeded in permanently evicting the pack rats, there were two possible explanations.

One is that a single pack rat had entered the building the last few times through holes above the purlins at Grid B3 and D3 on the southwest wall. I had thought those were tight, but I screened them over on 4/1/04, April fools day, just in case. If those were the last two holes, now that they are screened it would explain what had happened. The pack rat had made his final exit through the rodent valve while I was gone and now he can't get back in.

The other possible explanation is that John's hunch was right that there was more than one pack rat in the building. In that case, the one I released outside didn't come back in the building after all, but his buddy (or spouse) was who I saw snooping around sniffing the trap presumably looking for his missing partner. Then later, that one exited the building through the rodent valve and now that there were no more in the building, and the ones outside can't get back in, the peanuts on the floor and the bait in the trap have been untouched ever since.

I don't really care which of these explanations is right. I just hope that one of them is. Time will tell. And, if either of them is right, it turns out that my rodent valve worked as planned and it evicted the last pack rat.

I varnished all the logs that were prepared and then went to work outside taking down all the bat houses. This was the perfect time to do it. The weather was beautiful, the mosquitoes weren't out in force yet, and I had time since there wasn't going to be a den meeting in the evening. Removing the bat houses was a little hairy because I had to work from the top of a 20-foot ladder leaning against the trunk of a tree. Since the houses are fairly heavy and they were above my head, I didn't want to try to handle them with both hands and not hold on to the ladder and I couldn't handle one with only one hand. So I threw a rope over a limb above the bat house, tied the end around the bat house, and then tied the rope to a rung of the ladder. That way when the bat house came loose, it would hang from the rope instead of coming crashing down on me. Then I could use the rope to lower the bat house to the ground.

Some of the nails were really hard to get out. Some of them were even hard to find because they were as much as a half inch below the surface of the bark. A couple of the nails were sticking out far enough so I could pull them out with a crowbar. But for most of them, I had to use a nail puller. It takes two hands to run a nail puller so it was a little precarious but I got the job done. The only mistake I made was searching in the wrong spot for one of the nails. I dug a considerable amount of bark away with my knife before I discovered that the nail was about three feet lower than where I was looking. I felt a little stupid, but I'm sure the tree will heal. I realized it is a bad idea to nail bat houses to trees. I left for home at 2:10.