There was someone up the street who was feeding birds and other critters along that community's shrub/tree line between the community parking lot and the public sidewalk the last couple of years.
An area where they would toss out a BUNCH of bird seed. Seren always loved walking past there because she'd go into her "let's see what I can stalk" walk. She didn't much care about the birds, but a lot of squirrels would also eat the bird seed, so that was always fun for her.
Then they started throwing out a bunch of... I guess trash food... for the critters and setting out plastic containers of water near the dumpsters. One day I walked past and there was a pile of spaghetti and sauce on the ground. WTF?
Well, the inevitable happened.
Can you guess what happened?
If you said rats, you win the prize!
A metric buttload of rats moved in and started digging warrens in the tree line. As in Ratropolis.
Then they came in a poisoned the rats, and there were dead and dying rats all over the street and sidewalk to the point where we couldn't walk on that side for awhile.
So things calmed down, Seren and I started walking on that side again, and then suddenly... food starts coming back out and the rats once again descended.
Then I blew my knee out around this time last year and we changed our walking patterns so I have no clue what's going on up there.