Packing food for rodent protection

Most well maintained DOC huts do not have a rat or mouse problem these days. If you do see them then report it to the DOC office. They do regular hut checks and a bit of bait chucked under the bunk is usually part of that process. Also don't leave food in huts. Bad idea. If you do strike rats or mice I usually put all the food in a pack or bag and hang it from the rafters by a piece of string or rope. A karabina in the pack comes in handy for all sorts of things and this is one of them. (Damn that heavy pack again.)

I always hang my food in a bag from a rafter. While most rats and mice can climb just about anything to date my food has been left untouched despite sharing the odd hut with both mice and some seriously large rats (puketutu).

Don't know which huts P-Mickey's been staying at lately! But yes - Big Paul's method has worked fine for me.

I'm always surprised the mice don't get into the bag hanging from the rafters but it seems to work fine. If everyone took a chux cloth and wiped the benches and tables, swept the floor and took away packets of food, there wouldn't be so much of a problem.

Same here with the hanging. If hanging the food isn't an option, I try to wrap it up as tightly as I can (eg. inside my thick pack-liner within my pack, which I guess might suppress some of the scent but I'm no expert), and if possible keep it nearby. I've really only had a bag bitten through once, which was a zip-lock bag left out on a table, and that was somewhere on the Abel Tasman track.

Wrapping food in a pack+packliner has recently cost me a packliner (again). Just glad they didn't eat their way through the pack too! At typically 15 to 150 mice per Ha (100mx100m) in NZ native forests, and with a home range of ~50m - there will be plenty of mice within range of the hut, even if nobody leaves food for them. And if I were a mouse - I'd be living somewhere warm and weatherproof, if someone was kind enough to build it for me, and provide a way in! So whilst cleaning the hut is a good start, and will reduce the attraction of additional rodents into the location, there will always be mice. Rodent-proof huts are the only sure-fire answer. But I'd be gutted if we were to tear down our unique historic huts and replace them with bland, characterless mass-produced modern DOC constructions just to keep mice/rats out. So, lacking that, my solution: earplugs!

The hanging bag works for me and stashing food under a billy with a rock on top would do the trick as well. In a tent, I put the food in the pack by my head so I get woken by the opportunistic possum, whatever and keep my ice axe or someother blunt instrument handy as I really don't like pushy pests after my tucker. Watch out for leaving muesli bars etc. in your pack and parka pockets...

By most accounts here it is unnecessary but for future reference i've employed an effective method in the bush. On occasion when i've strung my pack or foodbag on a rope between trees to protect from ground moisture and rodents etc i've threaded the cord through two old plastic film containers end on end and placed them either side of the pack so as when the critter moves along the cord it will spin and they fall off.

I usually find that stringing it up using fishing line works well too, so far anyway.