The beach set of the Hamptons are really good at keeping things they don’t like out of view: chain retail, cell towers, and the less monied, to name a few. But the residents of the South Fork have finally met their match in the form of vermin, as the scourge of New York City has punctured the summer hot spot’s idyllic veneer with a new reality: rats. 

Not since the Kardashians tried to rent a house back in 2014 has an interloper caused this much collective horror across the oceanfront towns, hamlets, and villages, upending the social order. “I couldn’t believe it,” one summer resident, who asked not to be named for fear of being shunned, told Vanity Fair. “I’ve had a house here since 1989 and I had never seen a rat.” Then, she learned that an entire family was squatting on her property—12 rats in total. “I was totally freaked out,” she said. “I was worried a rat would run across the deck when people were over. How would I explain?” She lives in fear of her friends finding out about the rodents in residence. “Nobody will ever come over.”

But for others, the scurrying has come from inside the house. Another resident who asked not to be named shudders when she thinks about her recent rental, where she got late-night Nest motion alerts from the kitchen. “We would see them on camera running around,” she said. “It’s embarrassing to have rats,” she said. “And disgusting.”

Rodentologist Bobby Corrigan isn’t surprised East Enders are losing their minds over rat sightings. “There is a socioeconomic class that people associate with vermin,” he said. Meaning people in fancy, expensive houses don’t expect to have rats, which he said they relate to squalor. “Those people are very quick to be appalled.”

It’s true. The rat sightings have caused outrage and finger pointing—in true Hamptons fashion the blame game is strong. How can there possibly be rats in the Hamptons? How did they even get here? Is Mayor Eric Adams to blame? Did they come in the backs of work trucks, or on the Jitney? What about the throngs of city people who moved east in the early days of COVID-19 and never left? Longtime Hamptonites blame those newcomers for most everything else, so why not for the rats? Conceivably, a population increase means that there is more garbage generated more regularly—not just during the summer months. In addition, a surge of renovations has continued across all of the Hamptons. The vibrations from heavy machinery, in turn, may have displaced the rats and sent them scampering elsewhere to interrupt the flow of rosé. 

Corrigan said construction always gets blamed, but it’s not always at fault. He did say when someone tears down a house or a building to rebuild a new one, often old pipes remain in the ground. “Rats use those pipes as their apartment buildings.”

While construction debris in dumpsters won’t attract rats, leftover lunch and food-soiled containers tossed in by workers will. But workers’ trash isn’t the only guilty garbage. “Even millionaires or billionaires don’t take out their trash correctly,” said Corrigan.

Part of the cause of the Hamptons infestation is quite literally a chicken-and-egg situation. Many city transplants who arrived during the pandemic built chicken coops without realizing that organic eggs have unintended consequences. “The city people all came rushing out here and decided to raise chickens,” one longtime resident of Springs, a somewhat less expensive hamlet of East Hampton, said. “It’s like a mini Brooklyn here now.” He claims to have recently seen a rat “the size of a cat” on his doorbell camera and believes chicken feed, which often consists primarily of grain, is to blame.

He’s not wrong. 

“The first question I ask people when they call to report rats is ‘Do you have a bird feeder?’” said one exterminator at a local pest control company, who asked to remain anonymous. He said rats enjoy both bird feed and chicken feed, which is tossed on the ground. “People have been getting more chickens, [which is good because] they eat ticks,” he said. But rats like chicken feed. And eggs too. “Eggs are as great a source of protein for us as they are for rats.”

The misconception about Hamptons rats, however, is that they are new arrivals. In fact, they’ve always been here. 

“Sure, we’ve seen an influx of calls over the past two years,” said the exterminator. “Most people are panicky when they see rats,” he said. “They associate them with filth and disease. When you’re talking about rats out here, it’s just an animal. It lives here. It’s been here forever.”

Corrigan agreed, and said, “I inspect rats in the most exclusive high-end properties around the world. The fact that they show up in the Hamptons—this mammal is every place.” 

A wet spring, like this year’s, may mean an increase in rat sightings this summer. While the ultrarich have rats too, most pay for ongoing year-round pest control that kills and removes the rodents before they see them. 

Meanwhile, those with smaller pest control budgets must wait for nature to take its course, which of late has become less effective. A lack of local predators has meant uninterrupted propagation, though that may be changing. “Osprey, hawks, and eagles are starting to return,” the exterminator added.

Human interference may have inadvertently helped too. Like the tide, enthusiasm for raising chickens receded when pandemic transplants had to head back to the city for school and work. Rumors swirled that people tried to dump their fowl at a local farm, thinking they could rehome the birds, as one would rehome puppies. Not the case. As in the social scene in the Hamptons, there is a pecking order: The established brood usually kills the new arrivals.