RATS: Not in my neighbourhood!

Sometime in the past we have had a rat visit our backyard. He and the local squirrel and flocks of starlings seemed to take their turn at our bird feeder. In subsequent visits to the feeder they seem to have established a pecking order and the rat and the squirrel didn’t seem to be bothering the chickadees, sparrows, blue jays, flickers, woodpeckers, cardinals, and nuthatches. Over the years I have posted photos of all visitors except the skinny nosed, long tailed rodent to iNaturalist. I don’t want to admit that we have/had a rat in the neighbourhood.

I suggested to a neighbour that I would try obscuring the location in iNaturalist, but I wasn’t sure what lat/long the software might assign, and I jokingly said that maybe the rat would show up as being observed at her house. She was less than pleased...

So - the other day I realized that I would have to read the iNat manual – under HELP there are 2 good articles describing what happens when you set the geoprivacy flag to OBSCURE or PRIVATE. The default is OPEN. see https://inaturalist.ca/pages/help-inaturalist-canada-en#geoprivacy and https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/geoprivacy

Various iNat forums have over the years discussed the subject of posting photos of dead rats – a quick summary is as follows: upload the photo; select the attribute dead/alive; if dead and you know the cause provide details (death by cat|snap trap|poison|etc). One comment in the forum suggests the following: ‘For multiple sighting of dead animals that are all the same species, consider adding a note about how many were caught over a certain time period. You might also–particularly if you are obscuring the location–tell something about the type of environment where the rats were caught.’ (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/would-it-be-appropriate-to-post-observations-of-dead-pests-in-traps/9790/24).

Today I did a quick check on iNaturalist to see if anyone has been posting observations of rats in iNaturalist. Only 8 have been posted to date in all of HRM! 8 observers posted 1 observation each.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=27573&taxon_id=44540

You can view an old photo of mine of a cute little critter hiding in the woodpile under the bird feeder. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11796633. Back in 2018 I wasn’t aware that one could obscure the exact location. At that time we had a compost pile in our backyard and a couple of bird feeders – it might have been suspicious if I didn’t post a single observation of a rat.

2020 is the Year of the Rat – perhaps the CNC is an appropriate time to recognize that this critter does live in our urban areas. If you aren’t comfortable with providing the exact address, then simply set the geoprivacy flag to ‘obscure’.

FYI: Apparently good shots of paws are diagnostic!

For more information on rats go to iNaturalist.ca and explore - as of today, iNat shows that there are 2 species of rats in Canada: the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/44576-Rattus-norvegicus) and the Black rat (Rattus rattus, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/44575-Rattus-rattus).

Posted on February 8, 2020 06:41 PM by mkkennedy