3/30-4/1/04 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

The weather was 47 degrees and raining lightly when I arrived at 12:30. I opened the gate and, as I suspected, I was able to barge through the last remaining snowbank and drive all the way up to the trailer. After moving in and going up to the building, I found that the rodent valve flap was still closed but the peanut I had placed on the flap was gone. That was somewhat of a mystery. The only way I could figure it was that the pack rat knew that the flap would dump him outside if he stepped on it, so instead he must have reached down to get the peanut without stepping on the flap.

I went to work and sanded the eight logs, the portion of the PSL, and the stub which were all due for at least one more coat of varnish. Then I moved a whole pile of old lumber out of the living room and stored it outside. The long lumber I stored on the scaffold-frame rack on the back side of the building. The rest of it I stored on the porch deck. That cleared the living room floor so I could set up a scaffold tower there. I set up a two tier tower between Grid D and E. Before I quit for the night, I moved the lights I had set up in the loft so they illuminated the living room wall, and I set the trap.

On Wednesday I found the flap was still closed but the peanut was gone from the flap again. I put a new peanut on the flap but this time I put it on the far end of the flap to make it harder for the pack rat to reach it without stepping on the flap. Then when I went upstairs, I was disappointed to find the bait gone again and the trap was still set. I worked on the trigger mechanism to make it quite a bit more sensitive and set the trap again.

Then, from the top of the new scaffold tower, I planed, scraped, gouged, and sanded about seven feet of the Grid D purlin, the top seven logs between Grid D and E, and the left half of the top part of the Grid D PSL.

On Thursday morning, the flap was still shut but the peanut was still there. I figured that it was indeed out of reach. The peanut was gone from inside the pipe so I know he was in there. Then I was happy to see that the trap was sprung. I went through the familiar drill of releasing the pack rat outside once more and taking a picture of him. He ran behind the building again, and I went inside and listened, watched, and waited. ...Nothing.

Then, after five or ten minutes, I thought I heard a noise down at the pipe so I went down to the crawl space to check it out. While I was down there, I heard the unmistakable footsteps of a packrat running across the floor. I couldn't tell if it was the main floor or the loft floor so I quickly and quietly as I could went up the steps so I could see the main floor. I heard some more footsteps so I slowly climbed the rest of the steps looking to see where he was. I stood still at the top of the steps and pretty soon the pack rat came over to the trap and started sniffing it. I don't know if he was looking for more peanut butter or if he was trying to figure out how the trap worked, or what. Then I inadvertently moved my arm which startled him and he promptly ran away. I was completely baffled as to how he got back in.

I spent about an hour re-checking the walls looking for a possible way in. I couldn't find anything at all. The only possibility I could think of was the holes above the purlins on the other side of the building that correspond to the ones they had used before and which I had plugged. I think that if he had come in on that front side of the building I would have seen him, but not being able to think of anything else, I decided to plug those holes at Grid B3 and D3.

I could reach the hole at D3 from the scaffold tower, but I had to use the 20-foot extension ladder to reach the one at B3. I screened both holes over with hardware cloth. Since I had the extension ladder out I decided to pull the nails out of a tree that had been holding up a bat house. Some time ago, I noticed that another bat house had fallen from the tree it had been nailed to. What had happened was that the tree growth had simply pushed the bat house out forcing the wood to tear loose from the heads of the nails. The nails were 16d galvanized and they have a substantial head, but the bathouses are made of cedar so they couldn't keep their grip on the nails. Since those nails would end up embedded in the trunk if I didn't pull them out, I figured it was important to do so. One of the nail heads was about a half inch deeper than the surface of the bark so it was somewhat of a challenge to get it out. Fortunately I have a big nail puller which made the job pretty easy. I'll have to take all the bathouses down and pull all the nails out one of these days. No bats ever moved in so it's no great loss.

Finally, I went to work varnishing the seven logs between Grid D and E, the parts of the Grid D purlin and PSL, the stub log, and the final coat on six logs between Grid A and B. I left for home at 1:00.