To Know the Rat

I went to the rat-filled alley to see the life of a rat in the city, to describe its habits and its habitat, to know a little about the place where it makes its home and its relationship to the very nearby people. To know the rat is to know its habitat, and to know the habitat of the rat is to know the city.

When it comes to rats, men and women labor under a lot of misinformation-errors inspired, it seems to me, by their own fears rather than any earth-based facts. So, with this in mind, I offer a brief introductory sketch of the particular species of rat that runs wild in New York-Rattus norvegicus, a.k.a. the Norway or brown rat. I offer a portrait that is hysteria-free, that merely describes the rat as a rat.

A rat is a rodent, the most common mammal in the world. Rattus norvegicus is one of the approximately 400 different kinds of rodents, and it is known by many names, including the alley rat, the gray rat, the brown rat, and the common rat. The average brown rat is large and stocky; it grows to be approximately 16 inches long from its nose to its tail-the size of a large adult human male's foot-and weighs about a pound, though brown rats have been measured by scientists and exterminators at 20 inches and up to 2 pounds.

Rats are nocturnal, and out in the night the brown rat's eyes are small and black and shiny; when a flashlight shines into them in the dark, the eyes of a rat light up like the eyes of a deer. Though it forages in darkness, the brown rat has poor eyesight. It makes up for this with, first of all, an excellent sense of smell. Rats often bite young children and infants on the face because of the smell of food residues on the children. (Many of the approximately 50,000 people bitten by rats every year are children.) They have an excellent sense of taste, detecting the most minute amounts of poison, down to one part per million. A brown rat has strong feet, the rwo front paws each equipped with four clawlike nails, the rear paws even longer and stronger. It can run and climb with squirrel-like agility. It is an excellent swimmer, surviving in rivers and bays, in sewer streams and toilet bowls.

The brown rat's teeth are yellow, the two front incisors being especially long and sharp, like buckteeth. When the brown rat bites, its front two teeth spread apart. When it gnaws, a flap of skin plugs the space behind its incisors. Hence, when the rat gnaws on indigestible materials-concrete or steel, for example-the shavings don't go down the rat's throat and kill it. Its incisors grow at a rate-qf five inches per year. Rats always gnaw, and no one is, certain why-there are few modern rat studies. In terms of hardness, the brown rat's teeth are comparable to steel. Rats, like mice, seem to be attracted to wires-to utility wires, computer wires, wires in vehicles, in addition to gas and water pipes. One rat expect theorizes that wires may be attractive to rats because of their resemblance to vines and the stalks of plants; cables are the vines of the city. According to one study, as many as 25 percent of all fires of "unknown" origin may be rat-caused.

When it is not gnawing or feeding off-trash, the brown rat digs. Anywhere there is dirt in a city, brown rats are likely to be digging-in parks, in flowerbeds, in little dirt-poor backyards. They dig holes to enter buildings and to e nests. Rat nests can be in the floorboards of apartments, in the waste-stuffed corners of subway stations, in sewers, or beneath old furniture in basements, Often, rats burrow under concrete sidewalk slabs. Entrance to a typical under-the-sidewalk rat's nest is gained through a two-inch-wide hole-their skeletons collapse and they can squeeze into a hole as small as three quarters of an inch wide, the average width of their skull.

One of the things I find most fascinating about rats is that they have a sense of where they are and of where they have men. This is explained by the fact that rats love to be touching things. Biologists refer to rats as thigmophilic, which means "touch loving." Consequently, rats prefer to touch things as they travel. Their runways are often parallel to walls, tracks, and curbs; in infested basements, grease slicks from the rats' coats parallel ceiling beams and sewer pipes. Rats are thought to feel especially safe at corners, where they are simultaneously touching a wall and free to escape. As they travel again and again for food or run to escape oncoming trucks, rats develop a muscle memory that allows them to remember the turns, the route, the course of movement. As young rats follow older rats, the trails are repeated, passed on. Exterminators like to say that if the walls of an alley or rat-infested block were somehow taken down without disturbing the rats, the rats would awaken the next evening, venture forth, and travel precisely the same routes as the night before, as if the walls were still there. They would remember the walls. Deep in their rat tendons, rats know history.

Norway Included

The rat is a newcomer to America, an immigrant its ancient roots reaching to Southeast Asia. While its relative the black rat migrated south, the brown rat migrated north, to China, along the Yangtze River, and then into Siberia near the present-day Lake Baikal. The black rat came to Europe ahead of the brown rat, with the Crusades. The brown rat did not appear in Europe until the beginning of the 18th century.

Brown rats arrived in England in 1728, and in 1769, in Outlines of the Natural History of Great Britain, John Berkenhout named the brown rat Rattus norvegicus. He believed that the rats had come to England via Norwegian lumber ships, when in fact they had probably come from Denmark, since at the time Norway rats had not yet settled in Norway.

By 1926, Rattus norvegicus was in every state in America. It pushed out black rats everywhere. Brown rats also eventually spread to all the provinces of Canada, with the exception of Alberta, where in 1950 they were reported on the southeast border but were then repelled by an intensive government rat control program. Alberta still considers itself, in the words of the province's agricultural department, "an essentially rat-free province." Rat patrol officers paid for by this department are posted in border towns and respond to calls from homes, business, and nearby farms. They strike quickly to exterminate the intruders.

"From the Bronx Across the River Styx"

Little is written about the early settlement of Rattus norvegicus in America. Most reports state that the very first Rattus norvegicus arrived in America in the first year of the Revolution, then moved out into the country, as the American settlers were doing. One of their first landings was most likely New York City.

In the city, rats and men live in conflict, one side scurrying off from the other or perpetually destroying the others habitat or constantly attempting to destroy the other-an unending and brutish war. What I think of as one of the biggest New York City rat battles ever is the Rikers Island rat battle, which began around 1915 and lasted well into the 1930s.

Rikers Island is a little island in the East River at the opening of Bowery Bay, in Queens, just one of many little islands in the East River and all around New York. (Even New Yorkers forget the city is an archipelago.) Once, Rikers Island was small and green, an 87-acre patch of land owned since 1664 by a family of early Dutch settlers named Rycken. The city annexed the island in 1884 and used it as a dump for old metal and cinders. It was one of the first designated dumps in New York, a response to increasing problems in the city stemming from the garbage being dumped offshore; shipping was frequently obstructed by floating trash, and oystermen complained of raking dead oysters out of the garbage. Rikers Island worked as an antidote to the garbage problem until people began to complain about Rikers Island itself. Very soon, Rikers Island had grown into a 500-acre island, a mass of garbage on and surrounding the original island, which, in addition to being a dump, was now also home to a prison farm.

One of the complaints about Rikers Island was rats. Rats from all over the city came to Rikers Island, arriving on the fleet of garbage scows. Within the island was a 75-acre lake of stagnant water, and the rats lived along the shore, feeding on garbage, drinking in the refuse-infused lake; with its garbage and its putrid isolation, Rikers Island was a rat utopia. An official with the department of corrections at the time estimated that there were a million rats. The rats ate the prison's vegetable garden. The rats ate the pigs on the prison farm. The rats ate a dog that was supposed to kill the rats. The corrections department baited and trapped, but as is often the case in particularly large infestations encouraged by particularly large amounts of potential rat food, the rats bred faster than they could be killed. There was a suggestion that the city bring thousands of snakes to the island so that the snakes could kill the rats, then a suggestion that the rats be killed with biological weapons-the rats would be inoculated with ratdestroying bacteria, via a poison sprayed onto the garbage shores. Neither of those suggestions was acted upon.

Then, in 1930, rats from Rikers Island began to swim the river to Roslyn, Long Island, a high-toned summer community. That fall, according to newspapers, the sanitation department used World War I-era poison gas to kill some of the rats. The next year, a Manhattan dentist named Harry Unger organized a hunting party of a dozen rifle-armed men. Unger and his posse were about to invade the island until the city called them off, fearing the hunters might shoot the prison guards or possibly each other.

At last, in the spring of 1933, two exterminators-the Billig brothers, Irving and Hugo Billig-had some success when, after supervising the placement of 25,000 baits around the island, they carried off 2,000 rat carcasses on the first day. The brothers were eventually successful in significantly reducing the Rikers Island rat population, which they estimated to be three million.

The Modern Naturalist

Night after night, I sat in the same foulsmelling alley-a retreat unfrequented by most humans-and observed the rats. As the months went by, I came to know intimately the movements of these creatures through their habitat, and the accompanying scenery of garbage cans and hidden back walls.

A late-summer evening, almost fall. The rats were out, grazing peacefully in the two garbage berms, in the Chinese and the Irish trash. So many rats, at least a dozen visible now, some large, some small. I once read a rat study that suggested that the likelihood that a rat will eat depends on how safe he feels in his nest, which, it has occurred to me, is not unlike a human apartment dweller's consideration when ordering takeout.

Boldly, I stepped out into the alley, as if stepping from behind my blind. I was more confident by now, more at ease with the feeding patterns of the rats, though still a little jumpy. And when I stepped out, when I walked up into the alley, the rats initially hesitated at the sound of my footsteps, but then as I moved slowly, easily, they seemed to take less mind. They stayed on their course, making their jerky flights along the walls, into the bags, answering the call of the discarded-by-humans food. Precisely how many rats were they? I couldn't say at this point. I will, however, say that I could see between eight and ten rats at any given moment, which may not sound like a lot, but those rats appeared to be part of a larger relay team, one group replacing the next. Also, I lost count as to how many rats were in the heaps of garbage bags at a given time. The bags were animated now, each bag churning, heaving-a bar brawl in a pup tent.

As an experiment, I stomped. The three rats I could see moving at that moment froze. After the count of just four seconds, they started up again. Likewise, the garbage bags were quiet, then they resumed their soft rustle. Using my own unreliable visual methods, I would estimate between fifty and sixty rats lived here. But implementing a more general rule sometimes used by rat professionals-if you see one, then there may be ten in the vicinity-I estimated about one hundred rats living in the alley, hidden away in holes, basements, underground vaults. And to think that the first time I looked down the alley all I saw was a dead end! Still standing midalley, I now sensed multiple dartings, fast blurs in the corner of my eye, each causing me to momentarily consider an alley evacuation. I stood still for a little longer, nonetheless, attempting to focus again, to calm my nerves, to concentrate on the energy of these seemingly caffeinated quiverings-to become an all-sensing, outer-focused, night-vision eye. How bold these smallest strokes of nature!

I stood proudly at the top of the alley, looking down the incline toward Fulton Street, standing in a place that I felt was out of the rats' way, seeing the waves of pedestrians passing back on nonalley land and feeling only slightly repulsed, and a wave of calm finally came over me-until, looking left, I noticed that a small crack in the sidewalk was moving and then noticed that it was a rat. One rat, two rats, and then a brief rat squabble as the first rat attempts to return through the hole and crosses paths with a third rat coming up. It was a new rat source, another nest entirely, which I had only accidentally discovered in my moment of haughty self-congratulation. I turned the corner and looked down Edens Alley toward Gold Street and saw more rats coming up from holes in the street, through gaps in the cobblestones: rats hoisting themselves up, ramming their snouts up from below the street, pulling out their front legs and then heaving, hauling themselves up to quickly find the edges of the shiny curb, the trace of a wall, to scurry, to scatter.

This was a lot of rats for one person to handle.

I got out of there.

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