My wife had just finished using the facilities in the master bath of our Lincoln Park home when, suddenly, a foot-long rat appeared in the toilet and began swimming laps around the bowl.
“It’s as big as Ruby,” she said in a frantic phone call to me, referring to the smaller of the two cats that share our home. As a reporter, the rule of thumb is: When your wife says there’s a rat in the toilet, check it out.
So I called an exterminator.
Richard Camacho, who has worked for Smithereen Pest Management Service for 10 years, arrived in about an hour.
The facts of the case did not surprise him.
“They live in the sewers and they’re excellent swimmers,” said Camacho, suggesting he was impressed by the animal’s mucky habitat and athletic prowess. Camacho said he has only seen this once before.
The first time, “the rat had drowned by the time I got there,” he said.
This time, by the time he arrived, the toilet was empty.
My wife had given it no chance to escape into the house. When she saw the rat burst into the toilet up from the drain, she slammed the lid and stacked several heavy books on top.
Back to the sewer
Camacho said he was confident the trapped rat swam back into the sewer pipes. If it can come up, it can go back down, he surmised.
To investigate further, I called Matt Smith at Streets and Sanitation, which oversees the Bureau of Rodent Control.
“Almost everybody has heard about that over the years,” Smith said. “It happens; they’re a very resilient animal.”
How often?
“We see it once in awhile,” he said.
Smith said the city keeps no such statistics.
He explains that such an event is often tied to construction or maintenance projects.
A couple of hours after our brief phone conversation, Smith elaborated in an e-mail. “It is possible that that rat could have swam up the sewer line or entered through a broken sewer tile. In our experiences, a rat coming up through a toilet is rare.”
Still, many city governments acknowledge the problem and even publish suggested solutions.
Portland, Ore., for instance, provides its residents with specific instructions on what to do if a rat meanders through the sewer and into a toilet:
Clean out sewer line once or twice a month by pouring one cup baking soda and one cup vinegar followed by boiling water down drain.
If you find a rat in your toilet, remove rat, triple bag and contact garbage company for retrieval information.
On the other hand, the authorities in King County, Wash., suggests: “If you find a rat in your toilet, flush it!”
Dr. Robert M. Corrigan, a world-renowned expert on pest management and a self-proclaimed “urban rodentologist,” has seen the problem firsthand. “I always describe it as a conflict of interest: Someone sitting on a toilet and the rat trying to come up,” Corrigan said.
Corrigan’s book, “Rodent Pest Management: A Practical Guide for Pest Management Professionals,” is considered by many to be the bible of rat control.
While in college, Corrigan was on New York City’s front lines working as an exterminator. One day, he says he received a call from an alarmed woman saying a rat was in her bathroom.
“I responded to the call, looked around the bathroom and told her there was nothing in there,” Corrigan said. “Then she tells me, `lift the lid.’ And I did and there it was swimming around. I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t receive training for that kind of thing.”
Corrigan said he tried flushing the rat back down the toilet but it didn’t work. So he used a tool to hold it under the water until it drowned.
Old sewers a haven
He said large colonies of rats are often found in older sewer systems. The old brick and stone sewers, pocked with small ledges, holes, nooks and crannies, are like rodent resort condos. Newer systems made of large concrete tubes make for a bad housing choice for rats.
“They’re great climbers,” Corrigan said. “If they can get into a pipe, they’ll have no problems shimmying up or down it.”
To get to its final destination, the rat had to traverse some 100 yards in all, beginning in the sewer main beneath the middle of the street, up the 4-inch pipe under the basement, past the first floor and to the second, winding through a tight “S” curve and through a short 2-inch pipe until it found an exit.
To find out more about this remarkable creature, I called William Stanley, who oversees one of the largest collections of mammal specimens on Earth at the Field Museum.
Since 1991, Stanley has been investigating the natural history of shrews, bats and rodents of the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. And he can talk about rats until the shrews come home.
Stanley works on the third floor of the Field Museum, which is dedicated to rodents. Rodentia is the largest order of mammals and includes rats, mice, porcupines, squirrels and chinchillas. It makes up for more than half of the museum’s 177,000 specimens.
Stanley opens a drawer filled with the empty skins of Norway rats, the most common type in Chicago. They are lying neatly in rows and are stuffed and sewn into their original shapes.
“Here they are,” Stanley boasts.
Rattus norvegicus, best known as the Norway or sewer rat, is probably not from Norway but rather had its beginnings in Central Asia and migrated throughout Europe in the 16th Century, Stanley said. It came to this country in the late 1700s aboard European ships bound for the New World.
The Norway is primarily nocturnal, can weigh a pound or more and is usually about a foot long. The average life span for a street rat is about a year, while the lab variety, the albino mutant of the Norway, can live up to four.
Keen sense of smell
It has very keen senses of smell, taste and touch, which it uses to efficiently scout for food.
But, can it climb up a sewer line and into a toilet?
“I must admit, this is the first time I’ve heard of a rat going through a toilet,” Stanley said. “Typically, they go through the walls next to the pipes.”
Still, he said he wasn’t surprised.
“They’re excellent climbers,” he said boastfully. “The vertical part doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Stanley pulls out a heavy reference book, “Mammals of Illinois,” which is considered the authoritative guide to the state’s warm-blooded critters.
“Norway rats can [shimmy] up steel bars and wires, walk along cables and ropes, crawl for short distances on vertical brick walls, as well as other equally difficult situations,” the guide states. They can also jump three feet.
Plus, rats can fit into anything its skull and pelvis can, which means they can squeeze through a hole about the size of a quarter.
And, they could even climb up vertical sewer pipes, Stanley said. “Sewers are an easy highway and access into human habitation,” Stanley said.
All the experts say it’s unlikely my wife will ever again encounter a rat in the lavatory. And though it’s been more than two months since “the incident,” my wife refuses to use the master bathroom and, in fact, insists that when that toilet is not in use a stack of books remain firmly on the lid.
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Ratting out the vermin
– Rats live a nocturnal existence. Although they have poor eyesight, their sense of smell is acute. “Rats often bite young children and infants on the face because of the smell of food residues on the children.”
– The brown rat is known as Rattus norvegicus, Latin for the Norway rat. But the English scientist who gave it that name in the 18th Century, thinking it had arrived in the British Isles from Norway, was probably wrong. At that point, the brown rat hadn’t yet reached Norway. Most likely it came from Denmark.
– “The brown rat’s teeth are yellow, the front two incisors being especially long and sharp, like buckteeth.”
– “Rats carry bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi; they carry mites, fleas, lice and ticks; rats spread trichinosis, tularemia, leptospirosis. They carry microbes up from the underground streams of sewage; public health specialists sometimes refer to rats as `germ elevators.'”
– A brown rat “is gray or brown, with a belly that can be light gray, yellow or even a pure-seeming white.”
– The term that exterminators use to describe a rat that has dined on grain laced with an anticoagulant is “dead rodent walking.”
– When rats run, they sort of gallop.
Source: “Rats” by Robert Sullivan
