Mrs. Beeke

I shouldn't be jealous of my neighbor Mrs. Osorio's birdfeeder, but I am. I recently had to get rid of mine. Like hers, it was filled with seeds for the house finches, sparrows, and occasional titmouse. As the birds ate, they would sing and sing. But finches are messy and extra seeds were spread all over my patio. This attracted larger birds that couldn't get to the feeder like western scrub jays. They screeched and swooped in, chasing away the little birds to eat off the ground. Mourning doves would follow and the occasional mockingbird.

By night, however, the remaining seeds drew rats.

"They should call 'em ratfeeders, not birdfeeders," said Moses, the exterminator who came out after a week of hearing all-night exhibitions of scratching and rustling from the attic. "They come down from the hills looking for a steady source of food. Once they find it under a birdfeeder, they start looking for ways to move into your house."

I knew it must be something like that. On the first night, the sounds came from above the ceiling in the bathroom. I made a lot of noise and rapped the ceiling with the end of a broom handle. The noises stopped and I hoped they'd been scared away. The following night, however, I heard them directly over my bed.

As I stared up to the dimly lit ceiling, I imagined the first rat gnawing through the stucco, tumbling down onto my chest, and biting at my skin. I knew I would be too frozen with fear to do anything about it.

This time, I laid in wait, standing on my bed with a slipper in hand. When I heard a rat directly within striking distance, I slapped at the exact spot on the ceiling with my shoe. I expected a shriek of surprise, the sound of footsteps scurrying away, and maybe even imagined the rat telling its friends not to venture over to that part of the attic.

But instead, there was silence. The rat somehow knew I couldn't reach it and went perfectly still. I waited a full fifteen minutes then finally knelt back down on my bed. Before I heard it move again, I was asleep. The next night, it returned.

"We can seal up your attic and the crawlspace under the house," Moses said, checking boxes off a page on his clipboard as he walked me around my house. "In addition, we can put wire mesh under and around the gutters, drains, and eaves. That will also keep birds from nesting up there."

I hid my troubled wince.

"Problem is, you live in the canyon," Moses continued. "We can't do much about the outdoor rats. Once they've come down, they stick around. You're going to have to take the birdfeeder down."

I signed and initialed his contract and he got to work. I stayed inside as he spent the better part of the afternoon working around the exterior of my house. I heard him grunting as he tried to fit his girth through the crawlspace door or spy his ladder flashing by a window as he moved to a new section of gutter. I would then quickly move to another part of the house. When he knocked on the front door at five, his clothes were stained with sweat.

"Everything's done but the attic," he announced, nodding past the foyer. "No rats can get in or out, but if any are up there right now, we'll have to put down traps. Then I'll come back tomorrow and clean 'em out. Good?"

I nodded though I wasn't happy he needed to come back tomorrow. The first thing I did when I bought this house almost thirty years earlier was remove the doorbell the previous owner had affixed to a fence post down at street level. If I kept the front gate locked, someone could knock and yell themselves hoarse, but I wouldn't hear them up in the house. I liked it that way.

Up on the hill, the only sounds were the birds, the wind, and the occasional coyote at night. No sounds of the nearby city, another benefit of the canyon, and seldom any from my neighbors.