Rat birth control seen as ‘fabulous’ for Bushnell

There are fewer rats in the park these days because Hartford is making sure they have fewer babies.

“That park rocks all summer long, and there’s some rat populations that seem to increase depending on how much uses is in the park,” said Elizabeth Kavanagh, chief environmental health sanitarian for Hartford’s Department of Health and Human Services,referring to Bushnell Park.

“It’s event after event after event, and many of them include some kind of food,” she said. Food attracts rodents.

But now the chemical the city uses, which is technically an interrupter, Kavanagh said, works basically as rat birth control. Its brand name is Contrapest, made by SenesTech. The city began using it in April 2022.

“We do not want to use rodenticide. We actually don’t apply rodenticides at any of the parks,” she said. Rodenticide is used in buildings, however.

While the Parks Department maintains the 37-acre park, the green centerpiece of the city, “in between when they’re able to take care of things and also when there isn’t an event, there’s water, there’s good conditions over there for populations to increase,” Kavanagh said.

The park has had much less of a rat problem in recent years since the Parks Department has cut back on heavy shrubbery and replaced it with native plants, Kavanagh said.

“The park is really good right now,” she said. “There used to be a lot. It was much worse around the Corning Fountain. But the city actually redid that and it’s much better than it was. When we started this project that was one of the worst areas. The city has done a lot of work in that park as well.”

The other area with the heaviest rat population was the retaining wall near the railroad ties, Kavanagh said.

This season, the health department is pausing the use of Contrapest for a couple of weeks in order to flush the burrows with carbon monoxide gas. A hose is inserted into the burrow and the gas kills the rats.

“We’re going to try to really knock down, pretty much knock out as much as we can that population and then we will use the Contrapest just for maintenance,” Kavanagh said.

The chemical is a liquid that goes into a bait box, is eaten and poses “extremely low risk” to other animals, according to its website.

“Although it does not appear to cause permanent sterility, recent studies show that Contrapest can reduce local rodent activity by 95%,” according to parkerecopestcontrol. com. “In addition, another study demonstrated that Contrapest rat birth control successfully decreased the seasonal rodent population peak by 67% after 133 days of baiting.”

Kavanagh said the Bushnell Park Conservancy receives complaints about rats and “most of our data at this point is really subjective.” However, “we have not had complaints about rats in the park, unlike previous years,” she said.

She said there have not been reports of rats in Elizabeth or Keney parks or the other parks in the city, “but we could deploy it in a park in the city if it comes to that.”

“In the last year and a half to two years, I have not got any emails from people concerned about the rat population,” said Mary Zeman, manager of the park conservancy.

“There have been no recent complaints about it, which is fabulous,” she said.