Of all the New Yorkers who have coexisted with the city's enduring population of rats, few have had the upper hand like John James Audubon, who retired in the middle of the 19th century to a patch of uptown wilderness at what is now West 156th Street. He soon was shooting rats and painting them in a lively family tableau.
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Rattus norvegicus, the city's ubiquitous brown Norway rat, did not need Audubon's art for immortality. The rodents remain voracious survivors wherever humans strew edible garbage, which is pretty much everywhere. New Yorkers shrug when tourists excitedly take photos of rats nonchalantly crossing subway tracks. But lately some have noticed that floods from Hurricane Sandy have sent rats scurrying to drier ground in higher neighborhoods.
So far, this migration has not shown up on the city's five-year-old Rat Information Portal, an Internet data map that lets people click on neighborhoods and individual buildings for the latest in rat tracking.
The rats are "smart and getting smarter," says Timothy Wong, one of the city's many entrepreneurial pest fighters enjoying a business boom. Mr. Wong, who is wary of exaggeration, says he has never seen a cat-size rat, a common urban legend. "More kitten-sized," he allows. Two years ago, a double-size albino rodent was pitchforked by a park worker. It was later identified as a Gambian pouched rat — someone's house pet that wandered into misfortune.
So no need for alarm. Any subspecies on the move has not yet been dubbed Relo-Rat, the way Super Rat was saluted in the 1970s when it seemed to feast on pesticide. Rats seem to quietly outlive their headlines ("Rodents a Menace to Upscale New York Neighborhood," said The Huffington Post recently), same as humans.
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