Is there a Phil free for rat detail?

hadn’t even made it out. Having won the first round for once, and with the trap loaded, my fingers are crossed. Last winter, after the roof was replaced, I had none. That I heard anyway. But I only have to glance up to the ceiling light rose to bring me back to earth. A few years back, something died in the ceiling cavity while I was away. Inaccessible from above, I had to tape over the decorative gaps in the ceiling around the light fitting to block the pungent smell of death. Being a lazy pessimist, the tape remains part of the decor.

I do suspect that before they expired, my latest furry invaders munched through my burgeoning lizard population. Over the summer, I found myself sharing by back deck with lizards sunning themselves. And the back garden. Then the kitchen, and finally, just before rattus arrived, one little lizard came wandering across the carpet in the front room while I was reading the morning paper.

According to the Department of Conservation, I should have exterminated them too. These little critters, if I’ve identified them correctly, are as evil as the rats. They’re over-sexed Aussie invaders, that are out-breeding their local cousins and eating them out of house and home. In Australia they’re called “delicate skink” but here, the DoC propagandists have dubbed them “plague skink” and warned they’re known home invaders and carriers of diseases such as salmonella and cryptosporidium!

Indeed DoC, and it seems, Auckland Council are so down on my cute lizards, they’re currently trialling the ultimate weapon to fight them - a killer flock of 200 “biosecurity chickens” — specially trained to seek out and destroy a test infestation at Shoal Bay, Great Barrier Island.

Given the devastation backyard chooks cause in suburban backyards, I can’t help thinking there’s a nuclear weapon-type flaw in this scorched earth approach to conservation.

But getting back to the rats. We baby-boomers gets blamed for many things. But we can at least take credit for planting the suburban forest that now greens wide swathes of Ponsonby and Mt Eden and Devonport and the other areas we gentrified in the 70s and 80s. Tui and wax-eyes and other birdlife have followed, though slowly, I fear, due to the rat armies that remain endemic across the city.

Currently there are dad’s army groups dotted about Auckland, trying to take on this losing battle, and hat’s off to them. But really, this is a fight, on both a public health and environmental front, that cries out for direction and organisation at a government level.

Is there a Phil free?