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Aw, cute little furry buggers - until they decide to nest in your home

Posted by Dave_K on July 1, 2020 at 12:45:49

In Reply to: tree rats ... posted by deathtube 667 on July 1, 2020 at 08:35:52:

I could care less about holes in my yard. I've got a woodchuck living under my deck and chipmunks in my stone retaining walls. The woodchuck (and bunnies) help clear my lawn of unwanted flowers and weeds. And the squirrels and chipmunks help clean up the copious quantities of acorns that fall from the 50-75' oaks surrounding us.

Way back when we purchased our house, I remember seeing foam insulation board chewed away in the attic during our inspection. I figured they probably had squirrels at one point. I suspected the nearby gable end vent, but there was a screen behind it to keep anything from getting in.

Six months later I wake up to a scratching noise above our bedroom, and I go outside to see a squirrel is chewing away at the wooden slats in the same gable end vent. I scare it away by yelling and throwing rocks, but it's back the next morning, and again the next. After a few days of this, it starts ignoring my yelling and just hides between the slats and the screen when I throw rocks at it. So I eliminated the problem with a pellet rifle and put moth balls right behind the slats.

A year or two later, I hear something in the attic. This time, a squirrel chewed through the screen. I go up in the attic and chase it out, and then patch the screen. Naturally, the little bugger chews through the screen again. So this time, I got some heavy gauge woven steel mesh, the rigid kind, and stapled that over the screen. Deterred but not defeated, the squirrel chewed straight through a 2x6 to get around the steel mesh. Out came the pellet rifle again. I had to shoot it in the attic, watch it flop a couple times, and then pick its bloody corpse out of the fiberglass batts.

We have cedar siding backed by foam insulation board, which is a Downy woodpecker magnet. They love to drum away on it, banging away at one spot for a while before moving on to a fresh one. So every year I'm up on a ladder patching with wood filler. If they find a mate, you're in trouble because the pair will put a 1-1.5" hole all the way through to nest in your wall.

On one occasion, after getting rid of the woodpeckers, I didn't fix the hole right away, and a squirrel took advantage. Before I noticed it, the hole had gone from 1" to 3". It was cold and pissing rain, so instead of making a full repair I just nailed a piece of sheet metal over the hole and planned to fix it on a better day. But the bugger chewed around the edge of the metal patch, and somehow managed to pry the metal away from the wall enough to get behind it and back in. It turns out there was a pair of them plus babies in the wall. So I ended up letting them stay for a couple months until the babies left the nest, and then closed it up.

Fast forward to this past winter, when the same thing happened again. Except this time, the woodpeckers had put a hole up near the roof line on a part of the house that I can't reach even with my ladder extended the full 32 feet. So again I waited for the babies to clear the nest in the spring, and then put a pellet through the one adult that remained. Now I need to get a contractor up there.

I hate vinyl siding, but at this point I'm not sure I have a choice anymore.

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