By ELIZABETH SHEPHERD
For The Beachcomber

In a contest to determine Vashon’s dirtiest jobs, a leading contender for the grand prize would have to be the work done by one local business called The Rat Detective.

The company’s name might evoke campy noir fiction, but for owner Christopher McGonagle and his second-in-command Beth Flannery, workaday life is full of decidedly unglamorous facts. On any given job, the pair might crawl commando style through a damp, cobweb-draped crawlspace or step into a nightmarish shed filled with shiny black droppings and other telltale signs of rodent infestation. Finding odoriferous rat and mice carcasses, urine-soaked insulation, frayed electrical wires, compromised piping and other homeowner horrors are all just part of the daily grind.

Still, McGonagle and Flannery, who officially launched The Rat Detective in 2012 and now work with three additional employees, are upbeat about what they do for a living.

“We’ve seen some bad things and battled some ferocious rodents, but it’s fun going to work everyday,” McGonagle said on a recent afternoon at Café Luna — a cozy spot where he and Flannery had agreed to explain some of the Sherlockian secrets of their trade. “It’s a kick in the butt. Every house is different. I don’t see it as a bad deal. We do what everyone else hates to do.”

McGonagle, 43, looks like a stocky man at first glance, until he mentions that he is dressed in multiple layers of thick work clothes — two T-shirts, a sweatshirt emblazoned with his company logo, long johns and two pairs of pants. Wearing all those clothes, he said, helps assure he can always peel down to something clean and dry. He has a wide smile and bright eyes, and he leans forward as he talks about his line of work.

The Rat Detective is his second foray into the professional pest control business. Before moving to Vashon five years ago, he worked for a Bellevue-based rodent control company. He admits his fascination with his prey and quickly reveals himself to be a font of gruesome information about the habits and history of vermin.

McGonagle knows how far rats can swim (more than a mile in open water), how quickly their incisors grow (about five inches a year) and how small a hole they can squeeze through (about the size of a quarter). He knows about their sex lives (fast and furious, with males sometimes mating with 20 different females in a matter of hours) and how quickly they multiply (females can give birth to 12 litters a year). He knows what kills rodents effectively and quickly (predatory birds, raccoons and snap traps) and what doesn’t (older cats).

McGonagle is also well versed on all the nasty communicable diseases that vermin harbor, including hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, rat-bite fever and Bubonic plague.

But beyond all that, McGonagle also seems to understand what makes rodents tick and why they have developed such an egalitarian dependence on the human race.

“They want to be with people,” he said. “Like us, they like to stay warm in the winter, and they like to have babies. If you’re in a million-dollar house, they like to be there, and if you’re in a cardboard box, they like to be there, too.”

Despite Vashon’s relatively low human population, mice and rats are plentiful, he said. He estimates that there are about one and half times as many rodents as people on the island.

“There are a lot of free-growing plants that provide shelter and food for them, and lots of old houses with a lack of foundations,” he said. “We have houses close to the water, and the saltwater helps to corrode and eat away at structures, making it easy for them to enter. They also can feed on the sea life on the beaches.”

Flannery, 37, who has a background in office work and also works as a paraeducator at Chautauqua Elementary, is not as experienced a rodent scholar as McGonagle. But she’s no less of a hunter. Her biggest job satisfaction, she said, comes from having customers who are “just ecstatic because we were able to rid them of something that no one else had been able to do.”

The two not only work together, they also call themselves — for lack of a better term, they say — girlfriend and boyfriend. The banter between them is familiar and affectionate, and they laugh as they describe the gag-inducing gross-outs they have endured together — like the time Flannery pulled down some insulation in a crawlspace and two dead mice fell on her head, or the day McGonagle tried to remove a dead raccoon from a job site and its tail came off in his hand.

The Rat Detective offers a full suite of services, including not only trapping rats and mice but also sealing up their entry points into houses and outbuildings. McGonagle and Flannery also bill themselves as crawlspace specialists, capable of installing new insulation and vapor barriers, wrapping ducts and replacing them, and using foam and screening to fill in cracks in foundations.

Many clients opt for the company’s one-year Rodent Infestation Control program, which provides regular setting and clearing of traps, monitoring of new entry points, removal of carcasses and a one-year warranty on all work.

But unlike Orkin, Terminix and other larger companies that make regular visits to Vashon, The Rat Detective doesn’t use any poisons or pesticides to control rat and mice populations.

“We’re very green out here on Vashon,” McGonagle said. “We’re not out for mass murder, and we don’t have to poison half our wildlife to control rodents.”

“Eagles and owls prey on rats and mice, and if what they eat has been poisoned, it can make them very sick, too,” Flannery added, going on to explain that most rat and mice poisons contain anticoagulants that prevent blood clotting and cause internal bleeding.

Chris Anderson, a wildlife biologist who works with the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, said he was happy to hear that Vashon now has a local business dedicated to controlling vermin without the use of poisons.

“Trapping is definitely the best way to go, in a residential situation,” Anderson explained in an interview. “There is a lot of science out there that says poisons have an effect on wildlife, from predatory birds all the way up to cougars, and it’s been indirect. It can be animals you wouldn’t even think would be affected, like coyotes and foxes. I encourage folks in residential settings to be preventative and learn how to do this appropriately and recognize that poisons aren’t the answer.”

For Tracy McLaren, an islander who hired McGonagle and Flannery to deal with a rat-infested shed on a property she had purchased in upper Gold Beach, it was important to find a company that was poison- and pesticide-free.

“I had used one of the nationally known [pest control] chains at another house I had in Burton,” she said. “They came out and sprayed poison around, but I’ve got two small children and animals.”

The Rat Detective was able to solve her rodent issues without using chemicals, she said.

“It’s under control, they cleaned out the shed and sanitized it,” she said. “It is completely taken care of now, thank goodness.”

She regularly recommends The Rat Detective to friends, she said, and warns them that their problems might be a bit worse than they think.

“If you see one mouse or rat, that’s not all you have,” she said. “You have more.”

Contact The Rat Detective by calling 643-0058, emailing TheRatDetective@gmail.com or visiting them on Facebook.