Local Color / May 26, 2026
A Boise Woman Is Mapping the City’s Rat Problem, One Sighting at a Time
After noticing an uptick in rat sightings around Boise, a local woman built a community-sourced tracking map so neighbors can log and monitor rodent activity across the city.
BOISE, ID—One Boise resident got tired of wondering whether the rats her neighbors kept mentioning were a her-block problem or a whole-city problem, so she did what any reasonable person would do: she built a map. The community tracking tool lets Boise residents log rat sightings by location, giving anyone with a browser a rough picture of where rodent activity is clustering across the city.
The goal is less about alarm and more about pattern recognition—knowing whether a particular neighborhood, park, or stretch of greenbelt is seeing more activity than usual. It’s the kind of hyperlocal civic infrastructure that doesn’t come from City Hall.
It comes from someone who got annoyed enough to open a spreadsheet. Boise has a long tradition of exactly that.