Another rat myth—that “after the apocalypse, there will be nothing but cockroaches and rats”—rings truer. Through the decade that the U.S. government was testing atomic bombs in the South Pacific, colonies of roof rats were thriving on Eniwetok Atoll. They created a maze of underground burrows, and though the soil was burned off the islands by atomic blasts, and they were deluged by tidal waves, the rats survived. One tiny island endured eight atomic bombings, and the rats there not only appeared to suffer no negative physical effects from the high radiation levels but continued to flourish.
In spite of the common dirty rat moniker, and though they dwell in the muckiest areas of urbania, rats themselves are clean; they spend far more time cleaning and preening than humans do. The diseases that may be passed from rat to human (including salmonella, leptospirosis, and tularemia) are contracted by contact with concentrations of rat feces or urine or by being bitten. In some countries, bubonic plague is still an issue (though not in North America), and it is passed between rats and humans by flea vectors. There has never been a case of a human in North America contracting rabies from a rat. While many would beg to differ, rats are not officially recognized here as a public-health problem.
Still, they cause a lot of trouble. They chew through electrical wires and tunnel into homes and buildings. They reproduce wildly, sometimes within our walls. Rats are among the most omnivorous of omnivores, eating meat, seeds, roots, berries, spiders, beetles, various insects (including cockroaches), eggs, and shellfish and other shoreline invertebrates. Rats will eat any animal smaller than they are: baby birds, small reptiles, fish, baby squirrels and rabbits. They eat our refuse—our trash, pizza crusts, pet food, pretzels. Anything. It is estimated that rats eat nearly one-fifth of the global food harvest. It’s a little creepy to learn that the FDA recognized the impossibility of storing quantities of food without the presence of rats and so set a maximum amount of rodent hairs and droppings allowable in processed foods (including peanut butter).
Rats have poor daylight vision and prefer to come out only at night (if there are rats seen regularly during the day, it is a sign of way too many rats in an area and not enough food), and their bodies are covered with fine sensory hairs, which help them navigate through small tunnels and along the base of walls. They don’t care to wander out in the open—not because they are furtive, but because they lose the benefit of their sensory hairs and because that’s where they can be spotted by cats and owls.
Though we may partake of the common rat revulsion, most of us probably also know that rats are fascinating, intelligent, and make wonderful pets: they learn their names, come when called, bond readily with individual humans, play games like a dog, and snuggle to sleep on laps or in pockets. But rats may possess further depths that we are just beginning to understand. While laughter was long believed by ethologists to be a behavior limited to humans and, perhaps, the higher primates, recent studies show that young rats appear to laugh when they are tickled. They don’t emit the high laughter sounds when their backs are tickled, just when their tummies are—like human children. And compelling new research by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago shows that rats may actually exhibit true altruism. When one rat was locked in a small Plexiglas cage within a larger cage, another rat in the big cage often worked tirelessly to release its imprisoned rat colleague, without any reward and whether or not it was acquainted with the confined rat. When a pile of the rats’ favorite treat (milk-chocolate chips!) was also placed in the larger cage, the free rat would not eat all the chips herself but would liberate the caged rat and share the chocolate. The most wonderful part of the study was the behavior of the two rats after the imprisoned rat was released: they would run around the cage together, jumping and chirping, as if rejoicing that the previously caged rat was loose. Then, yes—to the chocolate. (But if you are stuck in a cage, better hope that a female rat finds you—females were far more consistent than males in endeavoring to release a caged friend.)
Wildlife-removal pro Sean Met tells me that the way most exterminators deal with rats is ridiculous. They kill the rats present, then they want to come back regularly to set up traps or a poison perimeter to continuously control the population. Met says that rats reproduce constantly, and they will always be around. The only commonsense way to keep them out of living spaces is through prevention. Get rid of any rats that are there, then cover entrances, including gutters and holes in foundation perimeters, with metal hardware cloth (rats can chew through solid wood, cinder blocks, and even lead pipes). Hire someone like Sean who knows rat psychology and habits to help you. Clip tree branches and shrubs that allow rats (or squirrels) easy access to your roof. Tidy food (including birdseed and pet food) storage areas in the basement, garage, or shed, and store all such food in metal containers, like galvanized trash cans with lids, which come in various sizes (rats chew through plastic). To reduce conflict with rats and all other urban mammals, bring pet food in at night. And if you see a rat in the yard, park, or subway now and then? Settle in and watch—rat behavior is endlessly varied and fascinating.
Like rats, squirrels are rodents. And while the two groups share some characteristic rodent-ness (like ever-growing teeth and the subsequent need to gnaw upon the World Tree), and though as smallish mammals they share an ecological niche by dividing it into diurnal and nocturnal halves, squirrels are not, as some like to say, “just rats with bushy tails.” The comparison is hard to resist: Aren’t they both just useless, pestering, proliferating, omnipresent, nonnative rodents? But the workings of the squirrel’s bushy tail actually creates a squirrel social system that separates it from any other rodent. Rats use their tails for support, balance, and thermoregulation, and they may do some other secret rattish things with their tails to which human researchers are not yet privy. But squirrel tails are another matter altogether. For squirrels, their fluffy, swishy tails are more than pretty—they are the very heart of squirrel life, and their function is even more complex than that of the New World monkeys’ prehensile tails. Here are some of the ways that a squirrel uses its tail: for balance while running; as a rudder while jumping; as a parachute; to cushion a fall (squirrels sometimes fall from great heights and then shock us by running off uninjured); for warmth (wrapped around itself like a blanket); for shade (held overhead like a parasol—the family name, Sciuridae, means “shade-tail”); as an umbrella; to swaddle young; to confound and scare off intruders; and as a surprisingly complex form of squirrel-to-squirrel communication. There is a whole repertoire of communiqués conveyed in the different twitches and swishes. I love this, that we might learn to speak Elementary Squirrel by carefully watching the quick turn and flash of the ticked fur.
Over and over, I have heard the same gut reaction to the subject of squirrels: “Squirrels are dumb.” They might be jumpy, flighty, twitchy, and strange (as any of us would be if we were regular prey to larger birds and mammals that make stealth attacks from behind), but squirrels are not dumb. Colin Tudge wrote, “Arboreal life requires dexterity and hand-eye coordination. Squirrels almost became intellectuals, but not quite.” Intellectuals, no. But squirrels are endowed with a strong native intelligence. In addition to tail language, they exhibit complex aural vocalizations. They possess a profound spatial memory, used to recover the nuts they bury as scatter-hoarders (the crows outsmart them here, watching as they busily pat the earth over their buried nuts, waiting till they leave, then swooping in to unbury the nut with their deft crow bills). They discover through tireless trial and error the one slender route into an attic. In spite of our best efforts to keep them from our birdfeeders, not to mention an entire commercial industry devoted to this end, they outwit us constantly, using multistep problem-solving that is beyond the capability of most mammals and probably some humans. In the face of organizations like the Squirrel Defamation Society, which promotes lethal anti-squirrel tactics beneath its banner slogan All Squirrels Must Die, squirrel populations continue to flourish. Watching the two squirrels that
share my home and garden (whom we call Worthington and Split-Ear), I have discovered that they know things about the place I live that I don’t. Secret, practical things. They know exactly which cherry limbs will support the weight of a squirrel and which won’t; the quickest, most direct place from whence to leap from the cherry tree to the fence; how to utterly disappear from the fence and into the shrubbery in fewer than two seconds; the best place to hide five baby squirrels. Most wild mammals know such things, useful in the round of their everyday lives. But squirrels know other things too. They know that no matter how many times they eat all the seed in the birdfeeder, we will fill it up again. They know that as much as we wave our arms at them, we can’t actually reach through the glass kitchen window. They know that we can’t jump high enough to reach them if they don’t want us to. And as Richard Mallery writes in Nuts about Squirrels, “No, they don’t always remember where they buried your nuts, but they do carry little black books with your name in them. They grade you from 1 to 10. If you offered good seed with easy access, you are a 10 and listed under Easy.” It is this sort of squirrel knowing that brings grown men to the limits of their sanity.
On the interwebs, you can find tutorials on lethal squirrel control, along with tips for catching the squirrels in your yard and cooking them for dinner. Recipes for squirrel stew, squirrel gumbo, and even a squirrel-melt sandwich abound, as well as recipes for other nonnative garden pests—house sparrow pie, roasted Norway rat. I personally have no interest in eating the urban creatures, but if one is a meat-eater anyway, I suppose the argument could be made that the ultra-local harvesting of nonnative animals is an improvement over meat obtained through the corporate animal-agriculture system.
I don’t believe in lethal control of wild animals except as a last resort. But fully apart from my personal feelings about such things is the fact that killing urban wildlife to reduce conflict can be only a short-term solution—as with moles, gophers, and even raccoons, in suitable urban habitat, new squirrels will quickly fill the void left by those that are killed, meeting the biological carrying capacity for squirrel numbers in your yard. So unless you want to continually trap or kill squirrels year after year, remember that lethal control, except for a particular problem animal, really won’t work and so is only a rather disturbing way of letting off steam. Though it is sometimes difficult to remember, the squirrels are not out to get you personally. They are, like all creatures in the urban landscape, including us, simply gathering food and water, taking shelter, and keeping their young safe. They are surviving—or attempting to. Most squirrels do not live one full year.
For every “I’m gonna kill that damned tree rat” comment I hear about squirrels, I hear another story, of another kind. People tell me of squirrels that they have tamed, or squirrel stories that have been passed from generation to generation. A squirrel raised by a father, or a grandfather, or a mother who kept her pet in a handkerchief-lined box. The stories are often accompanied by beloved photos, black-and-white and worn. A squirrel peeking out from the neck of a child’s threadbare flannel shirt. A squirrel cradled in the crook of a freckled boy’s elbow, the boy smiling in spite of Depression-era hardships. A squirrel in its basket-bed, carried everywhere by a beloved grandmother who has since passed. The fact of the animal being “wild” adds somehow to the significance of the relationship for these people as they hand down their stories of affection and connection.
Our dear friend Mike raised a wild squirrel from the time it was a naked kitten. He and his mother fed it with an eyedropper until it could eat solid food. They named the squirrel Rascal, and he lived in their house as part of the family. Mike tells about Rascal rolling on his back when they tickled his tummy, and about the squirrel’s plate at the dinner table, where he would sit every evening, on top of the table, eating cracked corn and other treats from his own little plate while seeming to follow the dinner conversation, looking from person to person, and waiting till everyone else left the table before jumping down himself. When Mike’s family moved to Oregon, his father told him that Rascal would not be able to survive in the new climate (even though he lived with them in a house), and Mike was just young enough to believe him. When Mike discovered the same species of squirrel common around his new home, he learned the real reason for abandoning Rascal: his dad didn’t like the rodent climbing and destroying all the window screens. When you hear Mike tell the story, you realize he has never quite forgiven his father this betrayal.
If You Can’t Beat ’Em…
To control squirrel destruction in the garden, it is best to take a two-pronged approach. First, cover your squirrel-loved crops with netting and your full-grown sunflower heads with translucent drawstring bags. Plant daffodil bulbs, which squirrels don’t like, instead of tulips, which they do. At the same time, attempt an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude and provide an alternative food source just for squirrels. String peanuts on wires or hang dried corncobs from a branch so they dangle a foot aboveground, just out of reach, so the squirrels have to work to acquire them. This will keep them both fed and busy (and may also keep them away from the birdfeeder), and, contrary to popular belief, it won’t attract more squirrels. If there is no alternative “approved” squirrel-beloved food source, they will patiently spend their entire day, and their not inconsiderable problem-solving capacity, figuring out how to get to your birdseed and garden crops. (And they’ll win.)
The official advice, good advice, is to avoid feeding wild animals, and especially mammals. It makes nuisances out of individuals, often resulting in their deaths. But the impulse to feed animals, and to tame them, runs deep. How could it not? We love to get close to creatures, creatures that are wild and yet choosing to draw close to us. We love that sense of hard-won trust, of wild nearness. We can imagine that we have a way with animals, and that this particular squirrel is here for the peanut, yes, but also perhaps because it likes us. We find ourselves in a moment of human-animal connection that feels deep, familiar, and true. We can see the huge, liquid black eye, the hundreds of fur colors gathered on one tail, the strangely soft nails, all of it closer, all of it more detailed, more wonderful than we knew. We can gasp, wondering if that darn squirrel is going to run right up our legs.
If we want to be eco-purists, then sure—we shouldn’t feed the squirrels. But what if we don’t? What if we just want to be people, people who sympathize easily with other creatures and who, though we would never feed a coyote or even a raccoon, just can’t convince ourselves that any harm could really come from feeding a squirrel? Well, then, at least be careful. Squirrels are not myopic, but like the eyes of most animals that are attacked from behind by owls or coyotes, their eyes are positioned on the sides of their head, increasing their peripheral vision. This means that while squirrels will not normally bite a human, it is hard for them to tell, at the difficult angle of a nut held in front of the nose viewed by wide-set eyes, exactly where the peanut shell ends and the peanut-shaped human finger begins. Other than trying to grab a squirrel, holding a peanut out to one is the best way to get bitten. If you just can’t help feeding squirrels, lay the offering in your palm instead of holding it in your peanut-like fingers. I’m still not advocating the feeding of squirrels, I’m just saying.… there is no black-and-white in the World Tree.
My squirrel confession: Even after writing all of this, even after warning against squirrel taming, squirrel feeding, and the whole finger-peanut-squirrel-peripheral-vision business, I have to admit that I tamed the squirrel that visits my study window. I opened the sash just a sliver, and over time I coaxed him into taking peanuts from my hand, beneath the window ledge, while I sat working at my desk. I excused my behavior in the name of research for this manuscript, yes, but also because I had become increasingly fond of my window squirrel, who I’d inexplicably begun to call Worthington. One warm day, I had opened my windows wide for the breeze, and I entered my study to find Worthington sitting on my desk eating peanuts from the bowl I kept there: urban-
wild research gone too far.
As we make our daily lives in the World Tree, squirrels throw us a tangled challenge. Of the two of us, squirrel and human, we are the species with the capacity to truly choose how we will behave. How well can we do? How gracious can we be? Surely gracious need not mean hosting squirrels in the attic, but it does mean figuring out what to do when they are there. It means finding our way and creating our best place in the community of beings within these confounding, semipermeable boundaries.
This morning, two squirrels ran right over my bare toes. This is our deepest fear about small rodents that we see in or around our homes, isn’t it? That they will somehow end up on our toes? I’d gone out to feed the chickens in the early light, and at a crossroads in the garden path, the squirrels flew by in a hot chase that left them oblivious to my presence, and scrambled like lightning over my flip-flopped feet, leaving the tiniest white marks from their nails and shocking all three of us into frozen silence. Instead of running away after recovering from their fright, the squirrels quietly began to explore the garden edges, forgetting the chase altogether. In the coop, the chickens were pecking at the new hen we introduced into the flock. There was a partially white starling in the front yard (rare!), and the neighborhood crows, who do not tolerate aberrance even in another species, were dive-bombing it mercilessly. Down by the green space at the edge of the neighborhood, folks have been seeing and hearing coyotes, and the electrical poles are nearly covered with missing-cat posters. Out in the garden, there are tiny tooth marks in the two measly pumpkins I managed to grow this rainy summer. I look again at my white-scritched toes and remember: This is it. This is the connection I seek, the movement, the creation, the re-creation. This is the peaceable kingdom—gorgeous, complicated, wild. This is the World Tree, the only one there is. And sometimes in my own human confusion, I envy the squirrel her running up and down again, her easy, intimate conversation with this knotted, messy, perfect tree.
The Urban Bestiary Page 11