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KELOWNA ROCKETS goaltender Jordan Cooke relishes the opportunity to be a gamechanger for his team this season.
COLUMNIST Maxine DeHart has discovered a new frozen yogurt franchise, the first in B.C., at Kelowna’s Orchard Plaza shopping centre off Springfield Road.
THE FRENCH Cultural Centre envisions a day when Nuit Blanche, a six day festival started in France to celebrate the arts, will have that same kind of event recognition and participation in Kelowna.
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THURSDAY September 19, 2013 The Central Okanagan’s Best-Read Newspaper www.kelownacapnews.com
Rats infesting Glenmore
Alistair Waters ASSISTANT EDITOR
JUDIE STEEVES/CAPITAL NEWS
HOMEOWNER Nancy Kummen sets out rat traps to capture the roof rats that devastate her tomato crop this year. It advises you keep food and garbage tightly covered and rat-proof the property. Bird or pet food should be removed immediately after feeding; trash removed and stored
material elevated. Piles of debris or lumber provide cover for them, as do thick vegetation. They only live for a year or so, but in that time, one pair can produce up to
50 young. Often they live and nest in attics, ceilings and walls, so screen any openings to keep them out. In recent years, rat infestations have been re-
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ported in Summerland as well as Penticton and there have been reports from the Glenrosa area as well as from the Mission area of Kelowna.
The popularity of Kelowna’s airport may be taking off but the cost of flying from the local facility appears to be grounded. An Internet website that specializes in finding travellers cheap airfares says Kelowna’s airport is the cheapest in Canada to fly out of. Cheapflights.ca has published its annual Canadian Airport Affordability Index which ranks Canadian airports—and U.S. airports close to the border that Canadians regularly use—based on the average airfare found in August to popular destinations like Montreal, Miami, Los Angeles, London, Bangkok and Cancun. This year, Kelowna jumped to second place on the index (from eighth in 2012), trailing only Bellingham in Washington State. Kelowna was listed as the cheapest of the 17 Canadian airports on the 20-airport index, a list that included major Canadian airports such as Mont-
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With a clang and a roar on the street outside her house, Nancy Kummen’s fresh ripe tomatoes, stripped from the vines, were taken away in the garbage truck this week, instead of being sliced into a salad on her counter. What she’d seen when she went out to her overflowing vegetable garden to pluck the ripe fruit last week, was tomatoes that had been eaten on the vine, still oozing juice and dotted with rat droppings. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw the destruction,” she said sadly. She admits she used to live in North Vancouver so she should have known better than to keep a compost pile to recycle onto her garden, but she knows better now, and she vows to change her ways. Compost can attract rats. In the meantime, she wonders what she ought to do to recycle compostable materials from her kitchen and her garden, or whether she’ll have to continue to put it into the garbage instead. She picked up rat traps from Buckerfields, but says the rats have been eating the bait off them and not setting off the traps. She hasn’t had any luck so far in trapping the rodents, but she saw one of them the other day, and
she believes they are the roof rat, or black rat, not the Norway rat common now in the Lower Mainland. It was a slim rat with a pointed nose. Kummen’s neighbour, Yvonne Herbison, has had more success in her trapping efforts, and said she has been doing so for the past year. She’s concerned about using poison because of the harm it could cause secondarily to owls and kestrels in the old Glenmore area they live in. Her grapes have been stripped by rats. Neighbours with fruit such as cherries which have been infested with Spotted Wing Drosophila and left on the tree, have helped to attract them, she believes, along with nut trees. Bird feeders are another issue, as feed left out for birds can also attract rats. Rats are not native here and occur uncommonly. The City of Kelowna has received several calls from residents in that area of town, but it does not have a rat control program. Instead, it advises residents to contact a pest control company, as does the regional district. However, the City of Penticton has a rat control pamphlet on its website which advises residents to work with their neighbours so everyone is taking the same measures to control them.
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