best bait and trap for mongoose.

[MarkP]

I read about a study conducted in Lava Tree state Park in which the stomach contents of mongooses and rats were examined specifically to see how many coquies they eat. Answer: not many. I also read about another study that examined mongoose droppings. Most of them had rat in them. Elsewhere I have read that mongooses do exert a control pressure on rats. It is somewhat naiive to assume that just because the rats are sleeping while the mongooses are hunting that the mongooses don't find them or find rat nests. A former co-worker once described seeing mongooses climbing palm trees in his yard in Kaneohe, hearing squealing, and seeing the mongooses come back down with baby rats. The major problem is that mongooses are generalists, rats are survivors, and in the maelstrom that is the modern Hawaiian ecosystem, ground nesting birds that evolved in specialized niches without land based predators for hundreds of thousands of years are neither.