Albany Park Taps Volunteers To Help Run Its Rat Birth Control Program

ALBANY PARK — Lark Digges-Elliot said there is rarely an evening when she doesn’t spot a rat scurrying around her neighborhood. The Albany Park resident said the rat infestation got so bad that she bought poison and bait boxes for her garage. However, Digges-Elliot said she couldn’t bring herself to put the poison out. When she heard a rat birth control program would be coming to Albany Park, she thought it sounded like the perfect, non-toxic alternative. “There’s something about the phrase ‘rat birth control’ that just immediately caught my attention,” Digges-Elliot said with a laugh. Digges-Elliot and a handful of other volunteers gathered at the North River Commission office on a recent rainy afternoon to learn about maintaining the 40 rat birth control bait boxes being distributed throughout Albany Park. Volunteers are given keys to access the bait boxes and each week, they replace the bait in the form of plant-based sausages made with cottonseed oil to reduce fertility in male and female rats over time, according to Farah El-Nahal, economic development specialist for the North River Commission. Albany Park is the third Chicago neighborhood to partner with the Arizona-based company SenesTech to install its rat contraceptive product, after Lincoln Park and the Wicker Park-Bucktown area. The bait boxes have entrances specially designed for rats and have been placed in alleyways along busy commercial corridors on Kimball and Lawrence avenues and around the Kimball Brown Line train station. The soft sound of sausage casings being punctured filled the North River Commission office on Thursday as volunteers donning matching “rat reduction crew” T-shirts wedged the sausages on metal spikes inside the bait boxes. Edgewater resident Pat Guizzetti said she decided to volunteer because she’d heard about rat poison contaminating the food chain and killing birds of prey. Two years ago, a family of great horned owls died in Lincoln Park and their deaths were confirmed to be rodenticide-related by the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn, Judy Pollock, president of the Chicago Bird Alliance, previously told Block Club . The rat birth control does not travel up the food chain, according to SenesTech . “I do think we have a problem with rats so I was curious about other solutions that are more humane,” Guizzetti said. Chicago was named “rattiest city in America” by Orkin Pest Control for 10 consecutive years before it relinquished the title to Los Angeles last year . Data from SenesTech shows the birth control program has been successful in Wicker Park, where rodent-related 311 calls have declined 36 percent in the year since it was deployed. SenesTech, which set specialized plate sensors in certain parts of Wicker Park to track rodent activity, also found that rat activity was detected at 74 percent of sensor locations in August 2025, compared with only 13 percent a year later. El-Nahal said the North River Commission, which operates the Albany Park Chamber of Commerce , reached out to the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce to learn more about the birth control program. The commission realized it did not have enough money in its budget to hire a vendor to maintain the birth control bait boxes, so it decided to involve volunteers, she said. The commission held an information session for volunteers at the end of September and it drew a crowd so large some people had to stand in the hall, El-Nahal said. “We knew our neighbors would get excited about an initiative like this,” she said. The program currently has 16 volunteers. Those interested in volunteering can call the North River Commission at 773-478-0202. “We all have the same goal, right? To reduce the rat population without harming them,” El-Nahal said. “We’re very grateful for our volunteers because without them, we wouldn’t have been able to launch this program.” ______________________________________________________________________ Support Local News! Subscribe to Block Club Chicago , an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make funds reporting from Chicago’s neighborhoods. Already subscribe? Click here to gift a subscription , or you can support Block Club with a tax-deductible donation. Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast: Are Illinois Republicans An Endangered Species After The Blue Tsunami? Episode play icon Are Illinois Republicans An Endangered Species After The Blue Tsunami? Episode play icon From Stoves To Overhead Heat: The History Of The CTA’s Warming Lamps Episode play icon Should Chicago Have Public Festival Grounds? It’s On The Ballot. Load More Search Results placeholder Previous Episode Show Episodes List Next Episode