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Since arriving from Europe in the 1600s, New York City’s rats have survived hurricanes, floods, terrorist attacks, riots, fires, a pandemic (they actually thrived during that), the Dutch and Crocodile Dundee II.
But as a result of New York’s most severe winter in years, when the city saw snow, then a historic deep freeze, then even more snow, the rat population might now be about to decline. For a bit.
“We would anticipate a drop in the number of rats in the spring,” said Bobby Corrigan, a renowned rodentologist who has worked with cities around the world to control rats.
“If they’re outside rats living in a park or something, and it’s cold, they stop mating,” he said – resulting in fewer rats than usual come spring.
An estimated 3 million rats live in New York, or one for every three people, and for many residents they represent a constant menace: rustling around in trash bags, bursting out from basements to scurry across sidewalks, or stoically wrestling a gigantic slice of pizza down some stairs.
They originated in Mongolia and northern China, Corrigan said, so the grown ones are well equipped to deal with the cold. He said rats will stock up on food in their subterranean burrows, creating “little pantries” to sustain them during extreme cold. It’s just the nookie that they refrain from.
“It’s just too dangerous to have a litter of 10 pups who don’t have fur. When the mom goes out to get some food, they’re subject to hypothermia,” Corrigan said. “So the smart thing is: don’t have a litter.”
The city has spent years, and millions of dollars, attempting to reduce the rat population, including by appointing a rat czar (the czar stepped down, after two years, late last year). And after decades of impasse between rat and human, officials are finally seeing some success.
The New York City Department of Sanitation told the Guardian that reports of rat sightings have declined every month for 14 months, something it attributes to a “massive effort to containerize trash”. This translates to most residents and businesses now being required to put their trash into sealed containers for collection. The policy supersedes New York’s idiosyncratic, and somewhat unwise, tradition of dumping trash bags full of food scraps on the street, sometimes in piles more than head height, where they could sit for hours or sometimes days until a truck came to take them away.
“It’s kind of crazy,” Corrigan said. “We’ve been putting out bags since 1971, and honestly, rats are just like: ‘Terrific. Plastic doesn’t keep us out. We’ll just feed for 50 years, at will, every night.’”
Corrigan, who has worked with New York on its rat problem, said “the compass is pointing the right direction” in terms of getting them under control. Even so, rats will always have a foothold in the city.
“Your dreams of no rats is never going to happen,” he said.
That’s good news for some people. Kenny Bollwerk, who also goes by the name “Rat Daddy”, runs two-to-three rat tours a week in New York, leading curious tourists through rat-infested areas around Manhattan. He carried on doing tours through the depths of winter, and has seen plenty of rats.
“I’ve still seen them and traced them. They have these little snow tunnels that they create, then they go back and forth to and from the trash or to their burrow. It’s like an igloo, or the Holland Tunnel,” Bollwerk said, referring to the one-and-a-half mile long vehicular tunnel which connects lower Manhattan to New Jersey.
Other rats have made increasingly aggressive efforts to gnaw and wriggle their way into restaurants, Bollwerk said. Through his intimate knowledge of New York’s rat-infested blocks, he can effectively guarantee his customers a rat sighting, something which is a source of great pride.
“If you go whale watching, you want to see a whale. If you go on safari, you want to see a lion or something. We’re hoping to see at least a couple of rats,” he said.
Rats may be his trade, but Bollwerk is no mercenary. He submits reports to the department of sanitation every time he sees rats on his tours: he said “willing to go out of business” to see rats completely gone from the city.
As Corrigan said, that is very unlikely to happen; for now the rat tours are safe. But people interested in a tour should be aware that what is usually a fun experience can, in winter, expose them to tragedy.
“Some of the above-ground burrows and the nests I’ve seen are more exposed to the elements than ones that are underground,” Bollwerk said. He recalled a recent tour where he stopped by a location he knew to be frequented by rats.
“There had been rats living inside of a closed restaurant. A whole family. And I saw two of them holding each other, dead,” he said. “It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
