A strange consequence of all the recent natural disasters in the US has been, for a very brief period, Donald Trump seeming if not adequate, then at least a calamity that falls below the level of a category five hurricane. That hiatus ended this week with his decision to rescind Daca, removing the limited protection previously offered to illegal child immigrants. But for those few, short days, the worst he seemed to have done was attend a flood zone with a wife wearing stilettos.

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Floods always seem biblical, but the storms in the southern and central parts of the US are given an extra dimension by the wildlife. With Harvey, and no doubt with Irma when it reaches Florida this week, the thing that makes these disasters seem less like a weather event and more like something from the pages of JG Ballard, or the Old Testament, is the presence of snakes in the water.

Animal experts make the point that during floods, animals, like humans, seek higher ground, and this drives them into populated areas and people’s homes and attics. In Houston, most of the snakes washing up in people’s houses weren’t venomous; “only” five of more than 20 species in the greater Houston area represent a danger to people. Footage from Missouri City, Texas, meanwhile, showed alligators swimming in a woman’s backyard. A man from a company called Gator Squad – an “alligator relocation” company, according to reports – gave residents two pieces of advice: not to panic; and to try to resist taking selfies with the alligators.

Beware of the squirrel

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tufty the Squirrel: ‘pretty bad-tempered’? Photograph: National Archive/PA

It was cool and dank in New York this week and rats were over-running the city. Stories about rats, like urban foxes, always seem to be apocryphal, and this one probably was too: a report in the Wall Street Journal, appearing under the headline NYC Rats Are Boldly Jumping Into Strollers, about a baby attacked by a rat.

The baby in question hasn’t been identified, but the source of the story, a local assembly woman, passed it on all the same, describing the rat activity as “brazen”. Bill de Blasio, the mayor, recently implemented a $32m rat reduction initiative.

Ground zero of the rat surge is said to be in my neighbourhood on the Upper West Side. Sure enough, at the weekend two rats crossed the playground, one at a run, the other with an impertinent swagger that seemed designed to communicate to the humans that the tables were about to turn.

And all this after a suspected rabid squirrel was sighted in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The squirrel in question was said to be “unusually aggressive” – something that animal experts came forward to point out misunderstands the fundamental nature of squirrels, who are all pretty bad-tempered – and bit five people over the course of one weekend. (No one bitten tested positive for rabies.)

Fear of rabies can mimic the symptoms of the virus itself. At the bus stop the other day, a woman standing next to me with a large dog, on a leash, watched in horror as it nipped a passer-by. The man went insane. It was amazing. He had every right to be angry, but he lost it in a way I’d never seen before, not even among people fighting over a parking space: swearing at her, demanding to see the dog’s rabies certificate, then jogging off again, cradling his arm and muttering, like someone suffering from the disease.

The road to nowhere

‘We had no larger sense of where we were, where we’d been, or where we were going.’ Photograph: Nick Koudis/Getty Images

The struggle to evacuate Florida before the hurricane wasn’t helped by airlines jacking up the prices, but even without that, the ability to plan ahead seems to be one with which many of us increasingly struggle. We are constantly advised to “live in the moment”, but one of these days we are going to be incapable of doing anything else. Phones obviate the need to be on time; checking a map before setting out has become obsolete. In the car at the weekend, I had a moment of panic when I realised we were completely dependent on the navigation system and had no larger sense of where we were, where we’d been, or where we were going, which, on reflection. It was perhaps an accurate assessment of where we are now.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist