Evening! I was hoping for a little bit of advice - I have recently discovered a resident frog in my garden and so I’ve been thinking about making a very small pond for him. I have an ideal container that is quite small but will do one frog and can bury it down in a flower bed. I think the birds could also have a bath if they wanted. However recently (April) the cats produced a dead rat (that they may or may not have killed themselves) and I have previously seen a live rat run across the garden and disappear behind the shed (last September I think). We only moved in in January 19 so I don't know about before they. So I’m very vigilant about anything that may encourage them. I suspect they come from the garden next to us which is empty but has two compost bins and a lot of garden waste piled up against the adjoining fence.
Also; we have put the bird feeders back out, which I know may well be a food source for them.
In our favour, we have two cats, no food lying around (bird seed is in feeders in trees with catch trays) and the garden is fairly tidy (although we can’t get down one side of the shed as it’s too close to the fence). There is no evidence of rats in our garden that either of us can see but the cats spend an extraordinary amount of time round the side of the shed that we can’t get to, so although there are no droppings or gnaw marks it is possible I suppose that something lives under there.
This could also be a hedgehog as they have been sited in the garden too... or a mouse (cats have also produced one dead mouse so far - again I’m not convinced they actually killed it but I could be wrong). We will call the council out for advice once they re open and to check our property - and possibly to liaise with neighbours if there are any in the vicinity.
So I’m after advice - will my frog pond make the garden more inviting to rats? I very much wish to deter them naturally from coming into the garden (I’m not interested in poisoning them) and don’t wish to invite them by providing water sources, when the bird seed provides a food source (as does the pear and apple tree) and the shed could provide shelter underneath it . I appreciate that rats live everywhere but I would prefer they lived next door and not actually in my garden. It's not large enough to share.
As an aside I'm not overly concerned that the cats will start hunting bathing birds or the frog - they spend a lot of time sitting on the grass whilst the resident blackbird hops circles around them and they rarely move. Occasionally they try to stalk a pigeon but they are very white and uncamouflaged and old and have (to my knowledge) never caught anything (hence my disbelief that they broke the habit of a lifetime and produced a fairly sizeable rodent as their first kill).