When The Building’s Away The Rats Will Play

A Carroll Gardens street now knows that rats need buildings in which to live:

A Carroll Gardens block has been taken over by rats, and the city Health Department has done little to combat the menacing pests, residents say.

Since a demolition project began on a Luquer St. lot last fall, rats have made the street their home, scurrying around in broad daylight, diving into garbage cans and nesting in car engines.

“They sit there and look at you; they are not afraid,” said Lisa Demaio, 29.

To get inside her building, the mother of two young girls said she’s forced to throw bottles “to scatter the rats.”

Yesterday, a rodent lay dead next to three overturned traps in front of the lot.

. . .

Residents believe the rats were stirred up by the demolition work at 100 Luquer St., where an 11-story condominium tower is set to rise.

An owner of the lot agreed — but said there is little he can do.

“Rats are not something we can control,” said Moses Gross, a partner on the construction project.

Gross said his office has hired an exterminator, who is set to begin work next week after receiving repeated calls from neighbors.

“I don’t think it will help,” he said. “Every time you do a demolition, they come out.”

Huge Bags Of Meat In All Five Boroughs Now

The city is full of “bewhiskered” harbor seals:

The inhabitants of Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, man-made piles in Lower New York Bay off Staten Island, have tended to be there not because they particularly want to be, but because they have to.

In the 19th century, the islands were a holding area for new immigrants feared to be carrying diseases. Later, they housed soldiers with venereal disease, quarantined parrots and, until the 1940’s, merchant marines in training.

But yesterday the 20 plump bathers lazing on rocks in front of ruined hospital buildings and paddling the flat waters off Swinburne had come of their own free will, and they seemed to be having a fine time. And for the scientists and students on a nearby boat, this was a very good thing.

The bathers were harbor seals, bewhiskered 250-pound ambassadors from the icy north, and they appeared as oblivious to the traffic whizzing by on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge two miles away as the drivers above were to them.

A few seals were first noticed on the islands in 2001, after decades of absence from New York Harbor. But as the seal population along the Atlantic coast has continued to recover and their wintering range has extended southward, the seasonal seals of Swinburne have returned and flourished.

“Look at them,” marveled Paul L. Sieswerda, the curator of the New York Aquarium. “They’re like bags of meat. They’re huge.”

“Man-made piles,” “Huge bags of meat” . . . sounds like a names for a band . . .

Last year, 1,200 seals were spotted off Long Island and Connecticut alone. This year, for the first time, the count has included the waters off New York City. Donald E. Moore III, the director of the Prospect Park Zoo and another passenger on yesterday’s voyage, said he had spotted 26 seals off Orchard Beach in the Bronx last week.

Hopes were high for yesterday’s trip, which set out from Kingsborough Community College on a 46-foot former buoy tender that the college inherited from the Coast Guard. But the seals did not immediately run out to greet the visitors.

. . .

“See right at the point — halfway between the rock and the water?” Mr. Sieswerda asked as the boat rounded Hoffman Island. “That black thing? That looks like how a seal would look. But I’m pretty sure it’s a rock. It hasn’t moved.”

More large black objects appeared on the shore. A cormorant! A tire!

“We’re trying to take a snapshot of what’s out here,” Mr. Moore said, trying to make the best of the situation. “Even if we don’t see anything, that’s valuable info.”

Then a distant glint, and another, and another one, closer.

“I got one bottling up by the pilings,” Mr. Sieswerda said, referring to a seal’s action of thrusting its nose straight up in the air. A few seconds later: “I’ve got two bananas now.” Seals tense themselves into an upward-pointing banana shape when they are alarmed.

Soon Mr. Sieswerda had many bananas, as the seals took note of the boat and dived off the rocks.

But they did not disappear for long. Soon the waters all around the boat had sprouted curious, dog-snouted faces. (A swimming harbor seal looks a lot like a swimming Labrador retriever.)

. . .

For good measure, the party spotted three more seals on the way back to the college just off Sea Gate, the gated community at Brooklyn’s southwestern tip.

The students were elated. “I would never have expected that around Coney Island,” said Avi Foster-Andres, a 20-year-old student in Kingsborough’s maritime program and a Brooklyn native.

The scientists were elated too. “We’ve got seals in all five boroughs now,” Mr. Moore said. “That’s really cool.”

Who Let The Dogs Out?

Meanwhile, Newsday/AM New York reports that Hal the urban coyote may have friends waiting to pounce on the city’s dog population — not a matter of “if” but rather “when”:

The coyote who was captured in Central Park Wednesday may have kin who are living comfortably in the Bronx or even in Manhattan.

His species has been settling in record numbers in and around Gotham, and are especially adept at surviving in cities.

“These animals are the ultimate urban survivors,” said Dr. Michael Klemens, senior conservationist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

“They are adaptable, able to vary their menu, and to find shelter in shadow of the most crowded city.”

The scientist said he was certain there is a breeding population of coyotes in the Bronx, and did not rule out the possibility that dens stuffed with coyote puppies are scattered around Manhattan. They could be getting by in wooded parks or even construction sites.

City officials speculated Wednesday that the captured coyote had made its way down from Westchester County. The animals were unknown in the state less than 50 years ago, but have since moved in en masse to fill an ecological niche left by the decimated wolf population, which was hunted close to extinction.

The coyotes here are much larger than their howling cousins of the Arizona desert. They have probably been interbreeding with wolves or even domesticated dogs, said Klemens, making the eastern breed bigger and stronger.

He Was Likely On His Way To The Met

The coyote on the loose in Central Park has been caught:

A coyote’s romp in Central Park ended yesterday with a tranquilizer dart and a nap, but only after a messy breakfast (hold the feathers), a dip in a chilly pond and a sprint past a skating rink-turned-movie set.

There was also a final chase that had all the elements of a Road Runner cartoon, with the added spectacle of television news helicopters hovering overhead, trailing the coyote and the out-of-breath posse of police officers, park officials and reporters trailing it.

. . .

Where Hal came from remained a mystery. [Parks commissioner Adrian] Benepe said that he had probably been driven out of Westchester County. Older coyotes do that to young males at this time of the year, wildlife specialists said.

He speculated that Hal had made it down to the Bronx and trotted into Manhattan across a railroad bridge at Spuyten Duyvil — “the narrowest, safest crossing,” he said.

But Mr. Benepe said it was also possible that Hal had dog paddled his way through the water beneath the railroad bridge. From there, he said, Hal probably meandered down the West Side to 72nd Street, where Riverside Park ends. And then, Mr. Benepe said, he turned left.

That was news to people in the neighborhood. “I see a lot of things pass this way,” said Ralph Mascolo, a doorman at an apartment building on 72nd Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, “but never a coyote.”

The coyote then interrupted a Robin Williams film shoot at Wollman Rink:

The search was called off Tuesday night. When it resumed early yesterday, a crew working on a movie called “August Rush” was busy at the Wollman Rink, just across a path from the Hallett sanctuary. Suzanne Kelly, from the film’s wardrobe crew, saw Hal “going after this lady’s dog.” A small dog, a Westie, she said.

Hal “looked hungry, I thought,” she said. “That’s what I was worried about.”

The posse chasing Hal cornered him by the Heckscher Ballfields, but he got away again. Hal retreated to the sanctuary, where a pile of feathers suggested that he had made a meal of a bird, probably a pigeon, Mr. Benepe said. After a quick swim across the sanctuary’s duck pond, he sprinted past the rink, where an actress in a wig was doing figure eights.

After catching the coyote, the plan is to return him to a more suitable environment:

Mr. Benepe said the plan was for a wildlife rehabilitator to take Hal out of the city and, after some rest and relaxation, release him in a more coyote-friendly habitat.

That’s “a more coyote-friendly habitat” as in “Fairfield County, Connecticut suburbs” where they are used to such sightings . . . suckas!

We Are All Exurban Now

Helicopters are flying overhead this morning searching for a coyote on the loose in Central Park:

An “adventurous” coyote that has roamed Central Park for four days shook off pursuers with dart guns and eluded capture last night.

Park officers and cops cornered the coyote — only the second spotted in the park in seven years — in the 4-acre Hallett Nature Center about 5 p.m. But it leaped over a fence and vanished.

“The wily coyote escaped,” said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

As NYPD aviation units flew overhead, park enforcement control officers hunted the tawny creature, which left a pile of feathers from its last meal in the preserve.

Benepe believes the coyote, which weighs about 60 pounds and resembles a lean German shepherd, came from Westchester County or the Bronx, either swimming across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek or crossing a bridge.

“It’s very unusual to have them in Manhattan. They have to be particularly adventurous,” he said.

Central Park hasn’t seen a coyote since April 1, 1999, when one was nabbed near The Pierre hotel on Fifth Ave.