Feed The Squirrels…Save Your Home!
Do you hear the pitter-patter of little feet in your attic and the morning is still young? You probably have squirrels in the attic.
Squirrels are very active in the morning and afternoon. If you hear noise in the attic during that time frame, it is likely a squirrel. A tiny footstep in the night is apt to be a mouse or a rat hunting something to eat. Both critters could be damaging your home, but we’ll concentrate on the squirrel.
The first step in squirrel removal is to find out where they are getting into the house and plug the hole. The entrances to homes are usually in or near a rotted piece of wood on the fascia board. They will also build nests in the soffit.
In older houses, those that have not been modernized by vinyl siding and aluminum, squirrels can enter the house at the attic ventilation louvers as well as the fascia and soffit.
Squirrels like to build their nests in the soffit of a house.
It’s good to make sure there are none of these critters living in any of those places before you seal off their exit holes or you will have an unusual aroma in your house when they die.
A stinky attic is also a good reason not to put out poison to kill the rodents. After about four days of lying lifeless in soft insulation where it has made a nest, a dead squirrel can create quite a stench.
I have a neighbor who boasts of the effectiveness of a gadget that looks like a small’50′s radio and puts out a frequency that is too high for a human to hear, but drives the squirrels crazy. It also makes neighborhood dogs go bonkers if they are in range of the little soundless gizmo.
I could use squirrel traps provided by the city animal control people, but my cat Spike would probably wind up in the cage, just like he did with the raccoon traps.
That time the squirrels watched him make a fool of himself.
There are quite a few commercial squirrel baits at feed and seed stores, as well as some large discount stores in their outdoor departments. Many of these solutions to squirrel problems have some of the same ingredients; crushed cayenne, serrano or jalapeno’ peppers.
Since I grow those in my garden, I run them through a vegetable grinder and reduce then to a red powder. I spread them around plants that I don’t want to be dug up by squirrels hiding nuts. I also scattered it around the vents of my house. The only drawback is that you have to do that each time it rains.
My cat Spike does a pretty good job of keeping my house and yard free of mice and rats. His record is not very good when it comes to squirrel eradication problems. He actually likes to watch the critters scurry from tree to tree.
Spike has learned to live in peaceful cohabitation with the squirrels on our property. He will lie in his sunny spot on the front porch and watch the antics of these rodents as they practice their aerial artistry high in the oak trees in our back yard.
This was not always the case. When Spike was younger, he would lie in wait for the squirrels to come down from the trees and then he would try to pounce on them. Fortunately for them, they were always faster than my cat and as far as I know, he never caught one.Now, thanks to Spike’s inability to chase these varmints away, I have at least eight squirrels in my back yard.
I have a theory as to why I haven’t had any squirrels try to invade my house.I feed them a lot of corn and sunflower seeds that I have left over from my garden. They are not fool enough to risk losing their free handouts by damaging my home! That’s how I get rid of squirrels in the attic.