The animal uprising saw an opportunity and grabbed it. When people fled New Orleans, they animal legions moved in and occupied the territory. So now, whether it's alligators in the swimming pools, opossums in the houses or rats overrunning everything, the animals are taking over.
NEW ORLEANS – Alligators have been dragged from abandoned swimming pools. Foxes had to be removed from the airport. Coyotes are stalking rabbits and nutria (a sort of countrified rat) in city streets. And armadillos are undermining air conditioning units.
In the year since Hurricane Katrina drove out many of the people of New Orleans, wild animals have been moving in. Some were blown in by the winds or redistributed by the floodwaters. Others were drawn by the piles of rotting garbage and by the shelter afforded by all the abandoned homes and tall weeds.
"In 20 years of trapping animals here, I've never seen anything like it," said Greg duTreil, who is licensed by the state to remove nuisance wildlife in the metropolitan area. "I'm getting calls night and day."
Marilyn Barbera said opossums are living under her home and in her garden, and one moved into her house, a white 1859 Greek Revival in the city's Riverbend area.
"It was about the size of a big cat and it just made itself at home," she said.
At Charlotte Anderson's house in the city's Uptown section, a neighborhood where wildlife usually means squirrels scampering across busy city streets, raccoons quickly cleaned out a dozen expensive, 6-inch goldfish from her backyard pond.
In suburban Kenner, Cherry Robinson found snakes in her yard, while a man in another part of town found deadly brown widow spiders, a cousin of the black widow.
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Complaints about rats have soared.
"They have more to eat than before the storm. Just look at all the piles of garbage, the stuff lying around, the empty buildings. This is a rat's paradise," Erick Kinchke, owner of Audubon Pest Control.
Claudia Riegel, assistant director of the New Orleans Mosquito and Termite Control Board, which handles rodent complaints, said the problem is not as bad as people think.
"People are also seeing them in areas they did not see them in before the storm," she said. "That makes them think it's worse than it is."
As an aside, if the rats are in places they weren't before, doesn't that mean the problem IS worse? Gotta love bureaucrats. Anyway, the animal reconquista of New Orleans is well underway.
The nutria is an aquatic rodent, sometimes raised on farms for their fur. Some of those escaped, or were turned loose, and they are expanding their territory. I’ve read reports in our local rag, The Daily Astorian (Oregon, where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of ’05-’06, and were miserable), about nutrias in the area. They tunnel into earthen dams and dikes.