Welcome to Rat Radar Stories
You found us. Welcome to the blog where public data meets urban wildlife and nobody pretends the rats aren't there.
What Rat Radar Actually Is
We pull 311 reports, health inspections, and critter sightings from official city databases across Boston, NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Cambridge. Every dot on our map is a real report filed by a real person or inspector. We don't estimate. We don't extrapolate. If you see a cluster of rat sightings on your block, that's because people keep reporting rats on your block.
We also track restaurant health inspections, because sometimes the most interesting critter data shows up in a kitchen.
Why We Started a Blog
The map is great for exploring. But data without context is just dots on a screen. The stories are where it gets interesting.
A neighborhood's rat complaints spike 400% in three months. Why? A blizzard buries NYC and suddenly pest control calls double. What's happening underground? A study finds that urban raccoons are physically changing, and the data backs it up.
That's what we write about here. We dig into the data, pull in community reactions from Reddit and social media, and try to figure out what's actually going on in the cities we track.
What You'll Find Here
- Data stories that connect the dots between critter reports, weather, construction, and city policy
- Science coverage when researchers publish something wild about urban animals (and they publish a lot)
- Restaurant deep-dives on closures, inspection trends, and what the health data actually says
- Community voices from the people who live with this stuff every day
We're not here to remix press releases. If we can't add something from our own data or from the communities we cover, we don't publish it.
Go Explore
The Critters map has real-time sightings across five cities. Restaurants has inspection histories you can actually search. And this blog will keep telling the stories the data is trying to tell.
See you out there.