Andreatta: Does Rochester have a rat problem?

David Andreatta | Democrat and Chronicle

Show Caption Hide Caption Is your city one of the rattiest in the U.S.? Got a rat problem? Makes sense if your home is listed as one the rattiest cities in the U.S. But there are ways to take care of your rodent problem.

Rochester fell four spots to 39th on the most recent “America’s Top 50 Rattiest Cities” list published annually by leading pest control company Orkin.

But you wouldn’t know it to hear residents of the city’s east side talk.

There, some say, rats as big as squirrels and as brazen as wild minks are roaming streets with impunity, burrowing in backyards, and dining in Park Avenue restaurant dumpsters like they own the place.

“These rats are very bold,” said Mary Gallagher, who described witnessing an alarming increase in rat activity in her North Winton neighborhood over the last year despite not having seen a rat in the area in nearly 40 years.

“They don’t scare,” she said. “I mean, we’ve tried to run them off, but they look like they’re mutants. Their teeth are all weird and they put ‘em up. They growl at you, they hiss. Really, they’re mutants.”

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Gallagher isn’t alone in her assessment that there’s a burgeoning rat population.

A recent post on the hyper-local social networking website Nextdoor.com asking whether anyone in the Highland Park neighborhood had noticed rats in their yards elicited dozens of responses from residents of Swillburg, Upper Monroe, East Avenue, Brighton and elsewhere.

“I (caught) three rats last week and one the day before last,” said David Petersen, who lives near East Avenue and Culver Road. “That’s about typical, two or three a week. They just keep coming and coming.”

Many commenters who claimed to be longtime residents wrote that they only began spotting rats in their neighborhoods in the last year or two. Some expressed a sense of validation, having believed they were alone in their run-ins with the rodents.

“I thought it was limited to this area but it has really spread far and wide,” said Michael Amy, who lives in the Upper Monroe neighborhood. “Judging by all the messages coming in from all the different areas, it seems really widespread in this quadrant of the city.”

Quantifying the number of rats in any geographic area is an impossible task.

For example, in New York City, which topped the “rattiest” city list for years and remains a bastion of ratdom, researchers have pegged the population to be anywhere from 250,000 to 8 million. The latter amounts to about one for every person.

That might be. While debating the merits of a federal rat control program in 1976, the Monroe County health commissioner got a laugh from the gallery for saying, in all seriousness, “I’d estimate there are as many rats in the county as there are people.”

Congress instituted a robust “Urban Rat Control Program” in 1969. Roughly $800,000 — the equivalent of about $5 million today — was reportedly spent annually suppressing rats in Monroe County in the early years of the program.

More than half the money came from the federal government, and paid for 30 rodent control workers.

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By the early 1980s, budget cuts had reduced the county’s rat control crew to seven, who were reportedly baiting as many as 15,000 rat traps in sewers. In 1992, the county cut the program altogether, although a few jobs were later restored.

These days, county rodent control falls under a broad umbrella of housing and general sanitation services. Complaints may be investigated, but rodent baiting is limited.

Now, in response to complaints, county inspectors mostly offer advice and educational materials for property owners to mitigate rat infestations.

So, are there more rats on the east side? Perhaps, but available data is far from conclusive.

Monroe County has fielded 223 complaints of rats or mice from Rochester residents this year to date, with 138 of them, or about 62 percent, coming in the last three months, according to county data.

But those figures are average, and may represent a small decline. The county fielded 355, 404 and 377 such complaints in 2017, 2016 and 2015, respectively. By way of comparison, the county was reportedly fielding upward of 100 complaints a month in the 1980s.

In the three months between mid-May and mid-August last year, the county fielded 125 complaints, and 136 and 146 complaints in 2016 and 2015, respectively.

“The uptick we’ve seen over the last few months has been fairly significant,” said county spokesman Jesse Sleezer. “But we don’t think this is a community-wide infestation.”

It may feel that way in some neighborhoods, though.

Kennedy Brayboy, of Innovative Pest Management Corp. in Rochester, estimated he’s made upward of 70 percent more service calls for rats this year over last, many of them on the east side of the city.

“Last year, I hardly had any rat calls,” Brayboy said. “This year, I’ve had about 20.”

Dale Larnder, general manager at Exodus Exterminating Inc. in Greece, said calls for rats are up 58 percent over last year.

“They’re everywhere and I’m not sure what we can attribute the increase to,” Larnder said. “It’s kind of got us all baffled.”

Bird feeders, chicken coops, compost, construction and any number of human activities can attract or disperse rat colonies.

As Robert Sullivan noted in his best-selling book, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, as long as there are humans around, there will be rats.

“I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but the same,” he wrote, “thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same.”

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.