"New York is the rat’s ideal habitat"

Growing up in Upstate New York, we knew that instinctively.  New York City was the home of all that was strange, and foreign, and bad, at least on those days when my mother, born in the city, didn't reminisce about going to the American Museum of Natural History during her visits to her grandmother.

The sentence is from a good article in the New York Times Magazines on rats and other aspects of urban ecology.  Did you know that white-footed mice are so "neophobic" (afraid of the new, like me) that the city supports genetically distinct populations?