After enduring weeks of overcast skies and squally showers, hordes of visitors had evidently spent the day at the heath, making the most of the long-awaited sunshine.
A confetti of carelessly discarded sweet and ice lolly wrappers littered the path to the 22-acre Heath Pond. The bins were overflowing with bottles, cans and fast food packaging, but rather than taking their rubbish home people had resorted to dumping bags of picnic detritus beside them.
As I watched a carrion crow tug the ham out of a half-eaten sandwich, I noticed movement inside one of the supermarket carriers. The plastic bulged, and a stocky brown rat squeezed out from between the loosely knotted handles. Two lithe youngsters slunk out of the bramble thicket, and the trio began scrabbling through the cornucopia of scraps.
Just as the adult sniffed out a browning apple core, a German shepherd puppy came loping towards them. The juvenile rats galloped towards the lake and leapt into the silt-clouded water. Paddling out to an overhanging willow, they each shinned up a whippy branch with squirrel-like agility. Unwilling to abandon its prize, the adult sank its yellow incisors into the fruit and skittered through the reed bed, disappearing into a bolthole beneath the boardwalk.
While domesticated “fancy rats” are praised for their cleanliness, intelligence and sociability, their wild counterparts are perceived as dirty, disease-ridden vermin. True, humans are susceptible to a host of rat-borne pathogens and, as well as spreading disease, Rattus norvegicus causes significant economic damage to property and crops, and threatens UK biodiversity. However, it is important to recognise that brown rat ecology is inextricably linked with our own – we can’t blame these opportunistic animals for exploiting humankind’s pervasive slovenliness and antisocial behaviour.
By the boat-hire hut, where mute swans, mallards and Egyptian geese congregate, a sign urged visitors not to feed the wildfowl, in order to avoid attracting rodents. Beyond the sign, foraging trails of star-like splay-toed prints surrounded the hotdog buns, hunks of granary cob and anaemic-looking crusts of sliced white that lay mouldering on the muddy bank. It was clear that, until we clean up our act, we are extending rats an open invitation.
