| Two important secrets are geography and recent occupation of the land. Rats (like sparrows) need to be around human garbage to thrive. Alberta's population is highly concentrated in a central corridor that goes from Edmonton to Calgary. Around that there is very little population: the Rockies on the West, the Saskatchewan prairies on the East, the uninhabited Northwest Territories on the North and Montana on the South. Besides that, the province was established in 1905 and had very few people until the oil boom in the 70s. These 2 factors made it easy to start early and expand the extermination gradually. These days the wars are mostly outside of the province, to prevent the rats from coming back. The only rats I've seen here are lab rats, grown under special license. I've had also the tiny field mice (actually it is a vole) in my backyard but they're very easy to catch: just keep the place clean and use a cheap trap once every 4 years. So our big cities don't have rats but we have lots of sparrows, crows, hares, magpies, squirrels, hawks, coyotes, seagulls, etc... Sometimes we also have white tail deer and pelicans. Oh, and we have almost no snakes or other reptiles, too! The only one I've seen is the gartner snake but here in Edmonton it is just a little bigger than an earthworm. |
That might just be because Edmonton has lots of enormous dew worms :)
There are bigger garter snakes around - I live just outside Edmonton and see them pretty frequently. I hear there are plenty of rattlesnakes in southern Alberta too.