RATS!

I have a confession to make: I like rats.

I mean, aside from their (alleged) role spreading the Bubonic Plague, their ability to gnaw through an entire home electrical system and the confetti of poopy pellets they leave behind in attics, what’s not to like? Ah, those black, beady eyes and twitching noses! The veiny, translucent ears! The best part of a rat, however, is his little pink rat hands. They’re so cute, so human-like. I would gladly share a high-five with such a hand if I could do so without risking Hemorrhagic Fever.

My rodentia romance goes way back. From the ages of 12 to 17, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, in a house on a four-acre, fenced lot. The previous owners had constructed an adorable mini barn on the property, presumably to provide shelter for the two goats we inherited with the house. In addition to Bumpy and Dumpy, that barn housed horses, a 300-pound Vietnamese pot-bellied pig and a family of mice.

Although the mice were unexpected guests with a tendency to chew through entire bags of grain, my mom refused to kill them. Instead, we bought and set up rodent cages and provided the freeloaders with complimentary taxi service to a wooded area 15 miles away.

“Be free!” my mother and sister and I shouted as we unlatched the cages. We may have even thrown in a good-bye wave or two.

We didn’t wish to murder the mice, you see. We simply desired to relocate the rodents far enough away that they couldn’t hitchhike back. Alas, I still fret about the poor mice families we inevitably broke up. Would those poor rat moms ever see their poor rat babies again?

Matt does not like rodents. He comes from practical, reasonable stock, the kind that fails to rejoice when a colony of 50,000 bees invades his Florida rental home twice in the same year. Although Bobby, Matt’s dad and our former landlord, might disagree, the holes haphazardly sawed into the ceiling and days of vacuuming up bees the beekeeper inadvertently left behind was well-worth the 10 pounds of honey harvested from our attic. Man, that stuff was fresh!

So when Matt claimed to have spotted a rodent-like creature swinging from the bird feeder outside our kitchen window, I immediately reminded him of our trip to Hawaii, when he mistook a mongoose for a mutant squirrel. Perhaps, like the bee incidents, he’d become worked up over a little innocent wildlife interaction. I did not want to risk the removal of my bird feeder, the sole source of our indoor cats’ entertainment.  Anyway, one malnourished rodent couldn’t possibly have any connection with the latest Attic Incident.

A few weeks ago, I awoke about 6 a.m. to hear something scurrying around above my head – in the attic. It was Matt. For the past few mornings, he had risen for work and undressed only to be greeted by a blast of frigid water from the showerhead.
“Damn!” he cursed as another box toppled in the attic.

I debated, momentarily, whether I should continue to lie still and feign sleep.

“What are you doing?!” I shouted instead.

“Looking for the water heater!” Matt said, peering down at me from the trap door opening in the closet ceiling. I noticed he wore only a towel. “It must be behind all this crap.” 

 He disappeared. And then —

“Oh! Gross.”

The sudden sight of the decomposing body made him abandon all thought of the water heater. He climbed down the ladder.

“There’s a dead rat up there,” he confided. “I’m going to be late. I’ll have to get rid of it when I get home.”

If there’s one type of rat I don’t like, it’s a dead one. The mental picture of rotting flesh troubled me the entire day – so much so that I recruited a neighbor for moral support upon deciding to dispose of the body while Matt was at work.

The horror of this mission must have puckered my face.

“I can do it for you,” Michelle said.

She was no-nonsense. A nurse and mother of two, she represented strength and determination. Honed by 12 years of domestic warfare, she was a hardened professional. I very nearly agreed.

“No, this is something I have to do myself,” I said. “But, if you don’t mind standing next to me while I do it…”

One by one, we scaled the ladder into the attic. Blood, guts, maggots – I pictured them all as we shuffled in the direction Matt had indicated. I wore surgical gloves and carried a 40-gallon black trash bag, the kind you can’t see through once the refuge is inside.

And there it was: A small white rat on its side, eyes and mouth wide-opened. A pile of rat poison pellets, apparently scattered by the landlords, was nearby. No blood, no guts, no maggots. The creature simply looked stuffed. But it wasn’t stuffed, I learned as I attempted to wiggle a sheet of cardboard under the body; it was so light little could be left inside.
The body didn’t possess enough heft to settle firmly on the cardboard, and I watched, eyes saucer-wide, as it repeatedly rolled off.

“Oh God! Oh God!” I said.

“Use this,” Michelle said, tearing off a wad of packing paper. Gloves or not, using a mere piece of paper for such an adjustment wasn’t nearly enough protection between my trembling skin and the rat’s lifeless coat, but I took the paper from her. Sucking in a deep breath, I brought paper and cardboard together under the remains in a scooping motion. Michelle held the trash bag as I dumped the deceased in and then completed a spastic jig of disgust.

So I guess, technically, a slight possibility existed that the “mutant squirrel” feasting outside could somehow kung fu her way past our ferocious house cats, find a way into the attic and suffer the same fate as her poor brethren. At least Matt was concerned for her safety. I experienced similar qualms when I looked out the window this morning to see the “mutant squirrel” pushing seed out of the bird feeder and into the hands of five or six adorable “mutant squirrel” babies assembled below. So sweet.

All right, Matt: If it means safeguarding those adorable pink hands from certain death in the attic, I’ll relocate the bird feeder.

End of a running rut

Along the San Francisco Bay Trail

My husband doesn’t know it yet, but he’s run himself into a rut; Matt runs the same, extremely steep, suburban route each day and then complains about his aching knees. He loves to get a rise out of me by popping said knees in my presence (gross!). But I have a solution to his problem: the San Francisco Bay Trail.

A neighbor mentioned the San Francisco Bay Trail when Matt and I first moved to Belmont, and I first ventured to explore it a few months ago. The trouble is that I mistakenly took the left path instead of the right after coming off the Highway 101 pedestrian bridge, and I ended up in the Marina Food Market Shopping Center and then had the dumb idea of following Hillsdale Boulevard back to El Camino Real. Thanks to the traffic, I was not particularly enamored with that route.

Today, I took the right route – the one that snakes behind Oracle’s corporate headquarters and extends for miles through Foster City along the Belmont Slough until it empties into the San Francisco Bay. The flat, paved path is shared by pedestrians, cyclists and dog walkers (free poop bags!) alike. Traveling toward the bay, the path passes parks, playgrounds and exercise stations before entering serene marshland inhabited by geese, egrets and songbirds. Near the edge of the Bay, sand and dirt trails weave through the tall grasses and lead to a series of jumps for mountain bikers.

In researching the trail, I was dumbfounded to learn it currently extends 330 miles to encircle the entire Bay Area but will eventually expand to cover 500 miles. Apparently, I’ve glimpsed just a tiny fraction of a massive recreational corridor encompassing the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Candlestick Point and the Golden Gate Bridge. Needless to say, there is plenty of new pavement for Matt to explore. I can’t wait to enlighten him.

It's a dirty job

Lucy, Ashley & Gene the Birdman

As a regular volunteer for the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA Wildlife Department, I’ve been blessed with the rare opportunity to perform hands-on care for a variety of species. This work has the ability to be both exceptionally rewarding and, at times, gag-inducing.

During the first of two squirrel “seasons” expected this year, I worked with orphaned and injured Eastern Gray Squirrels, which, interestingly enough, can be black in color if they carry a mutant pigment gene. My duties generally consisted of preparing and then administering formula via syringes outfitted with rubber nipples. The sickly sweet scent of Similac Formula reminds me an awful lot of vanilla Carnation Instant Breakfast – and not in a good way – but the squirrels don’t seem to mind. Watching them grasp the sides of the syringes with their pink little squirrel hands is pretty darn cute.

When squirrels are so young they can’t yet open their eyes (generally under 4 weeks old), feeding is straightforward because it’s permissible to hold them. It’s when they become rowdy juveniles and graduate to sharing a cage with several other rowdy juveniles that the task becomes tricky. By this point, your patients usually fall into one of two possibly categories: (1) they are nearly self-feeding and no longer desire formula, meaning you must chase them around the cage with the syringe or, (2) they are ravenous and steal each other’s food or suck on the syringe with such force that they can aspirate if you don’t hold back the plunger. Alas, the juvenile stage is also when they begin to bite, as I learned during a recent shift (Coincidentally, this happened to be the same shift I managed to squirt Similac into my eye).

With the PHS squirrel patient numbers dwindling, I’ve recently been assigned to the baby bird nursery. Between the nine incubators, handful of reptariums and countless mesh-covered laundry baskets, the nursery can accommodate between 20 and 30 birds at a time with each enclosure operating on a feeding schedule depending on the resident’s age, species and diet. Most of the birds are on the 30-minute timer, which means every staff member, volunteer and intern in the room abandons what they’re doing to feed them every 30 minutes when the timer sounds. With the exception of hummingbirds, which sip nectar from syringes, the feathery patients gobble songbird formula (administered by syringe), fruit and seed (in a dish) and defrosted crickets and live mealworms (administered with forceps). I sometimes feel sorry for the worms, especially when I have to snip them in half to accommodate a small beak. On the bright side, the birds are generally appreciative, gaping wide, flapping their wings and wiggling with excitement when they anticipate a morsel.  During my shift, nursery patients have included robins, starlings, mockingbirds, blackbirds, juncos, towhees, crows, jays and hummingbirds. Starlings, it should be noted, are incredibly messy birds that relish flicking formula across their enclosure. Otherwise, they’re good eaters and tend to shriek until their crops are full.

I’ve worked in the wildlife department courtyard a handful of times, a shift that generally includes scrubbing bird poop off wooden perches and raccoon mess from kennels. A few weeks ago, I had the great fortune of working the courtyard shift just before I was due to meet friends for dinner. On this particular day, the skunk kennel required cleaning with blasts of water and disinfectant from a high-powered hose, so I found a hooded white suit similar to the “bunny suit” John Kerry wore during his tour of the space shuttle Discovery – and I looked just as ridiculous, topping off the ensemble with giant rubber boots, surgical gloves and a face mask. But I remained clean!

Twice I’ve been assigned to Recovery, the section of the Wildlife Department that handles the intake of new patients and cares for raccoons, raptors, pelagic birds and opossums that for one reason or another cannot be placed in outside enclosures. On Wednesday, I prepared a kennel for a Northern Fulmar, a gull-like bird, observed the examination of a juvenile red-tailed hawk, cleaned up after a group of messy raccoons, defrosted 13 mice for the raptors’ dinner and learned how to use the centrifuge and read the results. It was also, unfortunately, a heavy day for euthanasia, with staff having to put down an injured coyote, an enormous skunk with a broken spine and a bat that interacted with a dog and must now be tested for rabies. Also of note, a local man found a baby opossum in his backyard and brought it in. The tiny opossum with his bug-eyed expression was cute, but Lucy, the 16-year-old cockatoo “Gene the Birdman” carried on his shoulder, fascinated me. Lucy is just one of 46 birds residing in Gene’s home, and he has trained her and many of her roommates to perform tricks for children’s shows and the like. He demonstrated how he flips her upside down to pick up items he drops and how he can cradle her in his arms like a baby.

Meeting remarkable Lucy marked the near-end of my shift, and, thankfully, I could “escape” before those frozen mice thawed and Gary, a colleague, could demonstrate his technique for skinning the rodents. Until next week!