Rat Tale

The latest of my adventures in home ownership is a short one—about four inches, to be exact.

I speak of none other than Rattus norvegicus, a single creature that terrorized me like a plague for months on end.

I might have had a rat in my home as early as last November, when I first noticed chew-holes in a bag of coffee in the basement. At the time, I blamed it on my last Airbnb guest, a particularly negligent fellow who had left spilled food all over the carpet and a window open to the bitter cold when he checked out—I wouldn't have put it past him to have also somehow mutilated the bag of coffee. But as time went on, the evidence began to mount that I had some kind of vermin problem.

At first it was just noise—occasional scratchings from the attic that were so rare, I was sometimes able to convince myself they were nothing more than the neighbors working outside, somehow acoustically reflected to sound like they were coming from above.

One time in early March, I had to purge my basement renter's refrigerator during a 2-day power failure, and I found a bunch of bags of potato chips at the bottom of the fridge. I never asked her, but why do you keep chips in the fridge, unless you're trying to keep them safe from rodents?

The noises continued, and I was pretty sure we had mice, except that they were unusually loud for such small animals. "Do you think we have a rat?" I asked my boyfriend one day when the scratching was especially noisy. "Nah," he said. "People usually only get rats in the city."

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

One day in March, I stepped into the basement storage room, turned on the light, and saw a grey creature streaking along the floor and into the space behind the drywall. That was no mouse! At the speed it was moving, it looked positively enormous. There was no doubt about it; we had a rat.

Although I said this adventure was a short one, I'm lying. From the moment I discovered the rat to the day I finally rid myself of it, approximately a month and a half passed. The intervening time was a long journey of frustration, which you now have the pleasure of viewing, in timeline form.

• March 19-ish: I see rat in basement, and my life changes forever. On this date, I also find the place where I presume the rat originally entered the house: an exhaust vent leading from the basement stove to the outside. The flexible ducting that connected fan to the the wall had been torn to pieces, basically leaving a huge 4-inch hole in my house just above ground level.
• March 20-something: I get crafty and make a pitfall-style trap out of a five-gallon bucket, some ramps, and a cardboard seesaw. Spoiler alert: While this trap will remain in place over the next several weeks and even get triggered twice, it will never succeed in catching the rat.
• March 24: I order a catch-and-release wire trap from Amazon.
• April 2: All quiet on the basement front, I begin to believe that maybe the rat is gone. Or, possibly worse, dead and rotting in the walls. My bucket trap hasn't been touched in a while, so I disassemble it.
• April 3: I see the rat again! Same rat time, same rat place! I begin to suspect that this rat is cleverer than I give it credit for. It's been deliberately avoiding my trap!
• Date unknown: At several points during this month and a half, I realize that the various repairs I've made to the entry hole have been unsuccessful. Stuffing the ducting back into the hole does not seem to last long, even when using rags to press it in more firmly. Closing the flap from the outside with a tile works, until the tile slips out of position. My last fix, wedging the tile into the ground before pressing it onto the flap, stays where it's put, but it's frustrating to think that the rat could have been exiting and entering my home multiple times during this ordeal, possibly mating with other rats and getting pregnant! For my own peace of mind, I decide the rat is a male.
• April 14: Where the heck is that trap I ordered from Amazon!? I check, and the arrival estimate is not until late July / early August! Amazon failed me! I cancel my order.
• April 15: I ask my boyfriend to order the same trap using his Amazon Prime account.
• April 17: At around midnight, the rat begins his invasion of the upstairs kitchen, tearing into a bag of tortilla chips and leaving havoc in his wake. I move all foodstuffs off the counter and into hard-to-reach places.
• April 18: Boyfriend's Amazon order arrives, but the rat trap is not part of it. I suspected this might happen, and wonder if I am meant to fail at this endeavor.
• April 19: Around midnight, the most horrible scraping noise emanates from somewhere near the kitchen. It sounds like the rat is trying to chew the house down. In the morning, I find puffs of pink insulation all over the floor of the basement storage room, indicating that he has been burrowing inside the wall.
• April 20: Taking boxes outside for recycling, I find the rat trap in one of them. My boyfriend just did a terrible job of opening them, and completely missed the most important part of the order! I set up the trap in a corner of the basement storage room.
• April 20 - May 7: I check the trap diligently multiple times a day...then every day....then every couple of days. It has not even been touched. Again my optimism gets the best of me, and I wonder if I might have gotten lucky and sealed the rat outside the last time I closed off the vent.
• May 7: I see the rat again! He runs right past my trap, and has clearly been doing so for weeks, so either the trap must be in the wrong place, or the rat has lost interest in peanut butter and tortilla chips (for the record, he never seemed interested in peanut butter, despite all the Internet advice to the contrary). I take the trap upstairs to clean and re-bait with something more tempting.
• May 8: By this point, several friends know about my rat situation, and one has been encouraging me to "borrow" one of the kill traps that are all around our buildings at work. Upon hearing of this third sighting, even the friend who has patiently indulged my desire for a humane catch and release is now suggesting that I just put out some kill traps. But no! I stand firm! I will take this rat alive! I bait the trap with buttered popcorn and painstakingly maneuver it into a dark cranny behind some plumbing, where I saw the rat emerge from last time. Later, while doing laundry, I see a patch of paint scraped off the basement outer wall that I swear wasn't there a few days ago. The patch is in the same place where we had a water leak repaired a few years ago, so this gets me to thinking that maybe, the rat might be thirsty and trying to get at the moisture behind the paint. So I place a dish of water inside the trap as well.
• May 9: Success at last! When I get up in the morning, I check the trap to find the rat inside it.

OMG!! For such a thorn in my side, the rat sure was cute! With his bulgy black eyes and soft grey fur, he looked like he would make an adorable pet. However, after all the damage he did to my house, I was happy to get rid of him. After taking a couple selfies, I carried him off into the woods at the end of my street.

For the record and others who would rather put 1.5 months of effort into humanely catching a rat rather than just poisoning it and being done, PETA says that you should release a rat no more than 100 yards from where you found it, because putting it in unfamiliar surroundings might confuse it and ultimately lead it to die of starvation anyway. The woods at the end of my street just squeaks into that radius, and there are plenty of unguarded garbage cans in the vicinity!

I never knew rats could jump (and I'm glad I didn't, because I would have been terrified to even enter the basement!), but they do! When my rat exited the trap, he took a couple of hesitant steps and then bounded away, leaping into the air every few feet in an impressive display of acrobatic activity. Well, that explains why he didn't stay in my bucket trap! 

Afterword

If all this action in this tale seems to take place in the basement storage room, that's because it is the least finished area of the house. A flood a few months ago resulted in the bottom 3 feet of drywall being removed from this room, making it basically the only place where the exterior walls, and insides of the interior walls, are exposed. I never thought I'd be grateful for this disaster, but it proved instrumental in identifying and catching the rat, since the room is now basically a window into the guts of the house.