I've been chasing rodent problems for the last year or so - some getting in the attic through a vent, and some in a citrus tree that they get to over a phone wire from a pergola.
Because it's easy to miss them on motion detect, I set up a continuous recording full resolution clone that I scrolled through to find what the motion detect missed, then adjusted settings. Sometimes motion detect would even miss when a trap was sprung, but it was easy to find on the continuous record.
I've had the best luck setting up a spare zoom cam on a tall tripod and getting it close to where the action is so that the rats are fairly large in the field of view, which took changing the cam position and the zoom a few times, and setting both the object size and contrast pretty small. Even then, it works best when it catches the glow of their eyes. For the tree, I put the tripod on my roof so I could see the top of the pergola.
When I reduced the make time below 0.5 seconds, I got too much motion detect from wind and such.
Once I saw where they were traveling, I set up traps along the paths (mostly along gutters and the top of the pergola), checked to see how they were avoiding getting caught and what baits they were most interested in, and adjusted things. For instance, on the pergola, I cable-tied a trap to a cross member, but they were coming to it from the wrong end, so when they triggered the trap, it flipped them up in the air instead of catching them. Reversed it, and in 4-5 days, I caught several of them.
I've caught most of them now, but it's a never ending battle - there are always more rats.
I am using a PTZ on the most zoomed setting. Close enough to see stuff if I'm watching it live.
