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What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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Posted by twlack (My Page) on Sun, Apr 11, 10 at 10:38
| First, please forgive me for killing these rats. Yes I use a spring trap to get them from my vegetable garden. But I'm in a fairly rural area of SW Florida and if I don't get rid of the "Veggie" rats I can not grow tomatoes. I even covered them with high density polyurethane netting (ever seen a truck of scrap metal on the highway covered with netting to keep the load from falling in the road?) and these rats chewed thru. I had a dozen tomatoes just getting pink and overnight all but 2 were gone.
So I trap them and leave them for our local bob cat on the edge of our yard. But he must be on vacation (or full) and the 3 dead rats were attacked from underground.
I did a little searching online and I can only come up with 2 options. At Wikipedia I found that some skinks will eat small rodents. I have seen many in our yard, but they really don't seem big enough to deal with these 5-6 inch rats.
I also found that shrews are very aggressive meat eaters and will actually attack a live rat. I've never seen them around but I do see lots of tunnels in parts of our yard and especially in the vegetable garden. I always thought they were moles. Do shrew tunnels, if they tunnel, look like a mole tunnel?
Here are a few photos of the dead rats as I found them this morning.
3 dead, half buried, rats (not for animal lovers, sorry)
I really am sorry to have to kill these animals, I suppose I could buy a cat, but what's the difference? Besides, there are so many around that even our bob cats don't keep them controlled. |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| they are voles (vegetarian surface tunnelers) |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| No animal has done that damage. Instead, various insects have. Insects which attack any & all carcasses they find. Those insects belong to nature's recycling crew. |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink2
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| forgot you wanted to know the predator.... hard to tell from the picture, is that soil around them? and are their heads missing? |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink3
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| sorry three responses haha... didn't see the bottom two pictures. Apparently the scroll feature is not over-rated. Thanks for posting this, I am not 100% confident on what the predator is and wish I had the opportunity to see it in person. My best guess is a weasel... I don't know where you are from but I'm assuming least weasel to be able to fit into the vole's burrow. Weasels have an innate instinct to kill as much prey as possible if the opportunity arises. The reason they do this is because they have a high metabolism and take the protein as they can. If they have excess food they will sometimes only eat the brains or in most cases they will store the food for a later time. Fishers also make food caches and a few others in the weasel family. I believe this picture shows a weasel's "cache." I don't think the weasel will come back and finish off the vole family because i'm sure some bird or insect will get at them first (especially because it seems like you live in a pretty warm area). Still... it may... Pretty awesome find and it seems like you found a natural pest control! no more trapping! |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| Carrion beetles ... they burrow under the dead animal and lay eggs, and as the larvae feed the animal "sinks" into the soft dirt where the larvae are. Something the size of a rat can vanish in a few days. |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| I am 100% sure nothing about this story has to deal with carrion beetles and other invertebrate. I am pretty sure the poster wanted to know two things 1: if the dead things are "rats"- which they are not, they are voles.
2: and what killed the voles- and this was most likely a weasel |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| animaltracks ... the OP said, "First, please forgive me for killing these rats." They may have been mis0identified, but the cause of death was not weasels. |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| yes you are right. thanks! |
RE: What burrowing animal would do this? Shrew, skink
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| I think animaltracks is right. We had a really similar problem with weasels. I guess that's why they got their name (dumb joke, I know). We really did have a problem like that. Just try to treat it as such, and see what happens to appear in your live trap! _____
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