Rats in the chicken run

 

One of a family of brown rats Rattus norvegicus living under a hen house at Home Farm in Beamish museum, entertaining visitors with their antics last Sunday, dashing out to eat a broken hen’s egg.

Rats have a liking for eggs. My grandmother, who worked on a farm, lived in what was then a very rural part of Sussex, with food stored in a larder. As a child it upset me that she prevented birds from building nests in her garden hedge, but she had a fear that rats might come for the eggs and then would find their way into her house.

We have an acquaintance who lives in a house next to a smallholding where the owner keeps several breeds of animals and stores feed that often attracts rats. They are highly intelligent omnivores and will eat most things that they can digest. Last autumn we watched them from her upstairs window, as they climbed her apple tree, nibbled through the stalks of ripe apples, then rolled the fallers downhill, through the hedge, to supplement their animal feed diet.

A sobering statistic: female brown rats begin to breed at three months old and can produce three litters of up to twelve offspring each year.

Rats!

There is a saying – widely regarded as an urban myth – that ‘in a city you are never more than ten feet from a rat’. Well, myth or not, in Newcastle this afternoon we were within less than ten feet of about twenty rats that were scampering over a triangle of grass near a pub, feeding on the lunchtime debris left in the grass around the picnic benches. The brown rat Rattus norvegicus is arguably second only to Homo sapiens as the world’s most successful urban mammal. We sat and watched them scampering around for about ten minutes, but unfortunately I only had a small pocket camera with me, so the pictures are not very good, but at least you can get some idea of the company we’ve been keeping today! While we were watching, as well as eating food scraps the rats were also eating grass and grass seeds, but never once attempted to nibble the scores of cigarette ends strewn around the benches – not a single smoker amongst any of them. Mostly they didn't take much notice of our presence, although they scampered back under the laurel hedge if we made any sudden movements.