permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

kevin s wrote:
> part of our issue of course is scale.
That's a very relevant point in "pest" control. Creating owl, etc, 
habitat may help a little, but your garden is superb rodent habitat 
complete with a very dense, attractive rodent-food source unlike the 
habitat that owls and other predators usually hunt in. All those great 
veggies means your garden is capable of supporting far more rodents than 
the surrounding wild land, thus it's unlikely that you can attract 
sufficient native predators to control them: owls need a much larger 
area to live than your garden or that which a nesting box will provide. 
That's why cats and other methods of a full IPM strategy are surely 
going to be needed. A built environment like a garden has cycles, 
densities, and flows that are unlike those in wild land, no matter how 
much we try to make it behave like wild land. I'd love to believe that 
an owl box and native plantings would be enough, but it won't be.

And I've just gotta chime in about the suggestion of live-trapping 
rodents and releasing them elsewhere. If the release area is good rodent 
habitat, it will already have rodents in it at or near carrying 
capacity. The new rodent will either die or kill a current inhabitant. 
And if it is not released in good rodent habitat, it will die, or move 
to good habitat and the above scenario will take place. Or it will move 
to someone else's garden, and then you've just given the problem to 
someone else. It's not a solution.

Don't kid yourself that you are saving its life with a live trap: you're 
killing it, just out of your sight and a lot slower than if you used a 
lethal trap or a cat.

The answers to these issues always lie in the understanding of how 
ecosystems function and how our own systems differ from them.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com