Rooting out the rats: Pests making inroads into Yuma region
Roof rats, a pest reportedly spreading throughout the Phoenix metro area, have also made serious inroads into Yuma over the last few years, setting up shop in yards or, in the unluckiest cases, nesting inside houses and leaving a costly mess on the owner’s hands.
Known for their ability to climb trees to reach citrus and other fruit, as well as the roofs of neighboring buildings, the rats are notoriously difficult to eradicate from an area once they’re established because of their ability to stay out of the reach of predators. They can slip through holes in walls as small as half an inch, and once inside gnaw on interior wood, drywall and wiring, as well as leaving their waste behind.
“That’s when people start hearing noises in the attic or inside the walls, and most of the rodents, including these rats, their teeth are always growing, so they’re always eating and they always have to be chewing on something, so that’s when they start doing damage to the wiring and the walls, stuff like that,” said David CazaresMata, a pest inspector for Truly Nolen’s Yuma location.
One customer told him he began noticing them in the neighborhood about three years ago, and “they’re definitely the new pest in town,” he said.
At least three Yuma pest control firms have been getting a lot of business from people seeking relief from the invasion of “rattus rattus,” as this species is known to scientists, with the calls concentrated in the west side of the city.
Cazares-Mata said the hotspot for calls has mainly been between Avenues B and C on the east and west, 1st Street on the north and 24th Street on the south, an area of older neighborhoods with lots of mature trees, including citrus, palm and pecan trees.
“That’s one of the areas that has a lot of activity. We get a lot of phone calls. We don’t get a lot of customers sometimes, because those treatments tend to be expensive, and they have to be done right,” he said.
There’s some consensus that neighborhoods in the vicinity of Avenue B and 8th Street seem to be getting the worst of the activity.
“Basically the RV parks
and the subdivisions around there have been noticing a lot of what we call roof rats,” said Robert Meraz, director of operations for Yuma Pest & Termite.
Meraz said the city’s growth may have contributed to the issue in other ways, since “Yuma was not known as a rat area” until the last couple of years.
He said there was a spike in calls about three years ago from 32nd Street and Avenue D on the western edge of Yuma. Another local exterminator, Frank Alvarez of Bug Warrior, says he’s found that it’s still ongoing in that area, as well as in the older sections of the city.
Cazares-Mata said it’s usually hard to pinpoint how any pest arrives in a city or infiltrates a neighborhood.
“Every customer has their own stories, they’ll tell you why they believe they’re in the neighborhood, but it’s really, really hard to know how exactly they got here. We know they’re here, we’ve seen the evidence, we get a lot of phone calls for that issue. So yeah, they’re here. How they got here, that’s the big question,” he said.
Most of the advice the three exterminators have for people wanting to keep roof rats is the same: Keep trees trimmed, especially those close to the house the rodents could use to get onto the roof. Pick any fruit off the trees promptly, and make sure to keep it off of the ground. Remove all standing water and keep all pet food and other food indoors or in a sealed plastic container, not in bags that can easily be chewed through.
And make sure the yard is well-maintained overall, Alvarez said. “That’s the big thing, where if the yards aren’t kept up or clean enough and you have a lot of debris piled up along the fence or behind the shed, they love that stuff. The best thing for people to do is to clean their yards and don’t have areas where they can hide, and then have babies,” he said.
Adult females can have four to six litters a year, with six to eight offspring each time. The average lifespan is only around a year, with sexual maturity reached around three months.
Keeping the rats out of yards altogether is difficult at best, Cazares-Mata said. “They can easily get into the yard, you just don’t want them inside your house. But to keep them out of your yard that’s a really difficult task to guarantee. That is their habitat, outside. They can come from anywhere. They can come from the neighbor’s yard, they can climb up the walls and they get in your yard,” he said.
If rats do make it into the house, the first step, even before setting traps, is exclusion, or making sure every opening they could have entered through is sealed, particularly in the roof. “Once you do that, then you’ve got to start trapping the ones that made inside the house, pretty much. Outside of your house, you can only do so much,” Cazares-Mata said.
He said his firm usually uses the traditional snap traps, baited with beef jerky so the rats are forced to pull on the mechanism and trigger the trap. “The traps have to be big, because the rats are big,” he said. Once that process starts things can happen quickly. Depending on the
infestation, the exterminator may have to come back three or four times a week to retrieve all of the dead rats and put new traps in.
Alvarez said nonlethal traps or poisonous bait can also be used in some cases. “It all depends on the area, whether there are kids or pets than can be around those areas, those are the things you have to take into consideration on what you’re going to use to take care of the problem,” he said.
Gene Bostic lives near Avenue B and 12th Street, and said he’s caught more than 60 rats in his house and yard over the last three years, remembering the first one vividly because it happened on Halloween.
There has been some damage to the house, though he sees it as minimal: “Other than chew holes in the wall and they chewed up some wiring and stuff, not that I know of. They haven’t chewed any water lines or anything like that, that I know of. They have chewed some electrical lines,” he said.
Neighbors he’s spoken to don’t seem to have as many rats to contend with as he has, “or they’re just not aware of it. Because once I became aware of it I got pretty aggressive in trying to get them because they got into my garage, and once they got into my garage they started trying to make themselves very comfortable.”
He hasn’t hired any pest control pros, sticking to doit-yourself mode. “I have talked to several exterminators, and they ask me what I’m doing, and they say that’s the only thing we can be doing along with that. They offer no other solutions other than what I’ve been doing, trapping and poisoning,” he said.
He said he uses pet-safe poison, and none of his three dogs have brought any rats in, as they’ve done with squirrels a few times.
Besides being messy and destructive, roof rats can also spread diseases to humans, including hantavirus and plague through biting or if people handle their feces or urine. Rats tested in Maricopa County after they arrived nearly 15 years ago, have not been shown to have any pathogens, according to the website of its Vector Control office.
Yuma County spokesman Kevin Tunell said the county health department has not done any testing of roof rats since they began to spread here, and they are generally considered to be a matter to be handled by property owners and private pest control firms.
He said the health department “would be involved if it was a public facility such as school, daycare, restaurant, grocery stores, and it would still be addressed through the facilities’ contracted private pest control entity or operator.” Residents with rats in their homes who contact the health department or its vector control division, which is only responsible for monitoring mosquitoes, are told to call an exterminator, he said.
Government efforts to control roof rats didn’t work out in Phoenix, according to the website of Maricopa County’s vector control office. After the rats were first discovered in the Arcadia neighborhood, “we attempted to use all of our government resources to eradicate the rat problem. To do this we put up over 6,000 bait stations on every telephone pole and tree on public land in Arcadia. The result was that the rats consumed only about 1 percent of the poison in the bait stations.”
Intervention by private property owners keeping their lots clear of debris and setting traps was much more effective but haven’t eradicated the rats, according to Maricopa County, which does not provide free bait stations or traps to the public.
Meraz of Yuma Pest said residents dealing with rat infestations often don’t want to talk to anyone about what’s happening: “Like anything else having to do with pest control, people are very private about it. And it doesn’t matter if it isn’t their fault, if it’s something like this situation, they might look to the public like they weren’t clean, or something like that.”
But keeping it quiet makes it even harder to deal with roof rats once they’ve come into the neighborhood, he said. “Even if they know it’s a health hazard, it’s like, ‘I’ll take care of my little area and that’s it, everyone else take care of their area.’ It has to be a neighborhood situation where you have to get on board, otherwise it’s going to be real hard to control,” he said.