D-Day + 38: More pestilence.

There’s really no other way to say this other than the blunt one.

We have rats.

There is no three-word sentence in the English language that I would have thought less likely for me to utter.  I love you.  That’s a good three-word sentence, maybe the best.  It’s beautiful today.  I’m on vacation!  Let’s go skiing!  Any number of three-word sentences that are pleasant enough to say out loud.  But “we have rats”?  Ewww. Even just typing those words gives me the heebie jeebies.  There’s nothing that makes my skin crawl more than the thought of brown, skinny-tailed vermin crawling around under (or on top of) our back deck.

But there you have it.  When we did our yard cleanup a couple weeks ago, we noticed multiple holes in our back yard, all heading right under the deck.  We had seen some small evidence of digging at the edge of the deck last fall, but we chalked it up to squirrels.  After all, we host tons of squirrels in our yard.  They are maddening, destructive rodents in their own right, but we’ve accepted that, since we feed birds, they are just part of the equation.  And, they can, sometimes, be almost cute.

But the amount and size of the holes we found that week, well, they clearly weren’t all the work of squirrels.  Ed said, “I’m afraid to say what I think this is”.  I knew it then, that it was bad.  If Ed couldn’t say it, I knew it was going to freak me out.

It should not have really been a big surprise.  Several weeks ago, as we walked through the park half a block away, we saw the carcass of a dead rat.  It was the first time I had seen a rat that close to a home of mine.  (I lived in downtown Denver for 15 years, and people talked – vaguely – of rats near the building’s dumpsters, but I never saw one.)  Then a week or two after the dead-rat-in-the-park experience, a neighbor across the street and several houses closer to the park told us – from a safe social distance – that she had rats under her front porch.  It was disturbing to hear, but hey, denial is a good place to be.  I read newspaper stories about how rats were rampant in the streets of some cities like New Orleans, now that much of their food source – the trash from restaurants and bars, now shuttered – was gone.  But I never dreamed that a home of mine would be infested.

We spent the next week exploring natural options.  We bought a “humane” rat zapper and caught one – mouse!  That just meant we are double infested:  we have both rats and mice!  Good Lord!  Ed worked on finding things to drive them all away.  Peppermint scented soaps.  Bay leaves.  Kitty litter (used, thanks to our two inside-only cats.)  He filled several of the burrow-holes with gravel.  We bought an ultrasonic thingy to try to drive them away.

All of those things just seemed to stir up the rats.  One morning, I finally saw a rat run across the back yard.  Then a day later, we saw two more in the same small back yard, and it sent me over the edge.  You know how The Sopranos series starts with Tony Soprano passing out with a panic attack?  Well, that’s kind of where I was.  Shaking.  Crying.  Ready to throw up.

One has to wonder how someone who grew up in rural Iowa turned out to be so squeamish about rats.  And mice.  And snakes.  And all kinds of vermin.  I didn’t get that from my mom.  Many years back, when I was in Iowa to see Mom, I went out for a run.  I passed a large dead snake in the middle of the road on the outskirts of town.  It freaked me out, even though it was clearly smashed and dead.  I told Mom about the HUGE snake in the road, and she wanted to see it, too, so we drove to the scene.  My mom looked at the snake and shook her head.  “Honestly, Judy!” she said.  (That’s what she always said when she was exasperated or annoyed with me:  “Honestly, Judy!”.  Not to be confused with the “Judith Ann!” that she would thunder when really upset with me.  Nope, this was just annoyance, and puzzlement.)  “That’s just an old bull snake.  And that’s not huge at all!”

But squeamish I am, and squeamish I remain.  It sure seemed huge to me.

Which means that, by the end of that first week, we called in the big guns, and had an exterminator come out and place bait traps around the back yard.  We were fearsome of the impacts of using poison; we’re both mindful of not contaminating the food chain.  The exterminator assured us that the poison metabolizes in the rat, and that it won’t harm other animals – even if, say, a hawk picks up a rat for food, it won’t kill the hawk.  The bait traps are too small for the squirrels or neighborhood cats to access.   We’ve been assured, but, like so much in this world today, we’re not completely sure we believe everything we are told.

The exterminators also told us that the rats, once poisoned, would disappear from our property as they left in search of water – an effect of the poison.  But on the next Saturday morning, when they came back to check the bait traps, there they were:  two dead rats on the pathway in our back yard.  Have I said ewww?  Apparently, the extermination is underway.  Thank heavens the exterminator took the dead rats away with him.

We’re both extremely sad that we had to discontinue our bird feeding, since it is, no doubt, the bird seed that is the food source that draws the rats.  The exterminator tells us that we can start feeding again after 4 weeks, but, well, that just seems like a long time to abandon the birds.  Sigh.  I’m sure they’ll find food out there, but sheesh.  Nothing like running a full-on smorgasbord for our feathered friends and then closing the doors abruptly.

Empty feeders

All of this has been a huge distraction from the coronavirus crisis.  Our house deep cleaning project took a big slow down while we’ve been dealing with the Great Rat Infestation of 2020.  On Easter Sunday, we were both sufficiently depressed by the state of the world, including our rat crisis, that we decided to just shut it all out.  While it snowed outside, we turned up the heat, pulled down the blinds, and watched movies all day long.  When I looked outside, I didn’t see any rats.  Just pure white, beautiful snow.