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Surprise! A rat drowned in a basement toilet Tuesday night.

(Stuart Tomlinson/The Oregonian)

You've heard about potty humor, but there's nothing funny about finding a rat in your toilet.

Turns out, the rat I discovered in our basement toilet Tuesday night in Northwest Portland — a young one, quite water-logged and quite dead -- is a classic Portland sewer rat story.



And it's more likely to happen after the kind of heavy rain that fell in Portland this week.



"The rats are in the main sewer system, but when it rains it drives them into the sewer lines that run from your house to the street,'' says Randy Witten of Nature First Pest Control in Tigard. "A juvenile rat will try to return to the main line and run into an adult rat; the juvenile rat can either try and swim up the trap under the toilet or get eaten by the larger rat."



If the rat is large enough, Witten says, it can leap out of the toilet bowl and then it's in your house. More often, the rat treads water for as long as it can before it eventually drowns.



Multnomah County Vector Control receives 10 to 15 calls a year from people in Portland who have found rats—alive or dead— in a toilet, usually a ground level or basement toilet, says manager Chris Wirth.



"It's not too common, but it does happen,'' Wirth says. "The sewer is the one way out and the rats just keep on going up and through the toilet."





A Norway rat foraging for food.

Although rats are active year-round, they're more likely to be found indoors from fall through spring because their outside food supplies are dwindling, Wirth says. Alpha male rats, thankfully, are too large to fit through the trap between the toilet and the sewer lines, so the rat in the toilet is more likely a juvenile.



They drown, Wirth says, "because they are fatigued and just can't get out."



And as I suspected, the rats in our Northwest Portland neighborhood are attracted to yards with bird or squirrel feeders; we have four bird feeders.



"Bird feeders are the No. 1 attractant for rats," Wirth says.

Finding a rat in the toilet may not necessarily mean there's a large rat population in your neighborhood, Wirth says. They live throughout Portland's sewer system.

On Friday, a vector control agent is coming to my house to do an assessment and will leave traps if needed, a service provided to any Multnomah County resident for free.

And while it may sound obvious, there's one sure way to keep a rat that makes its way to a toilet out of your house: Keep the toilet lid closed.

Here's a quick guide to what you can do if you find a rat in your toilet or want to prevent rats from congregating nearby:

Multnomah County Vector Control can be reached by calling 503-988-3464.

-- Secure your home by eliminating or closing any points of entry.

-- Store firewood and lumber at least 18 inches off the ground.

-- Keep vegetation at least 3 feet from foundation of home.

-- Rodent-proof compost piles and bins.

-- Pick up nuts, fruits, garbage, bird or squirrel food that may reach the ground.

-- Do not store junk or clutter in your yard.

-- Remove yard debris piles.

-- Inside the home clean food residue such cooking oil and grease and any other food items off counter tops, floors, and stoves.



-- Stuart Tomlinson









