Keeping Squirrels Out of Your Montgomery Alabama Attic!

Podcast Transcript: Travis McGowin Thank you for joining us again for another episode of the Peskies Pest Control Podcast. Today, we have a very special topic to talk about. Wildlife, and not just any wildlife, one that causes so many problems, so much frustration, and it’s just an overall nuisance to a lot of homeowners, and that wildlife is squirrels. Now, just recently, if you’ve been following along with our YouTube channel, you would have seen that I posted a video where we were actually trapping squirrels at a customer’s house here in Deatsville, Alabama, this customer woke up Christmas morning to some crazy noises going on inside of their kitchen. They’ve got an older home. The layout is a little bit different than what you might would typically see nowadays when people build a new build. So inside their kitchen, they actually had a kitchen cabinet that, when you open the doors, actually showed their breaker box. So the breaker box for the electrical wiring in that portion of the house was hidden behind this old kitchen cabinet, but the breaker box wiring actually went straight up into the attic, so there was no buffer zone. There was no enclosure that hid these wires from view, so when the squirrels made entry into the attic, they were able to come straight down through the wall void, following the wires and right into the customer’s kitchen cabinet. So imagine yourself waking up on Christmas morning to enjoy that time with your family, only to have pure and utter chaos from a rodent running around inside your kitchen, knocking things over and just making a mess. Thankfully, the customers were able to open a window in an adjacent room, using a broom or some other item inside the house, they were able to shoe that squirrel to that room and get the squirrel to leave the house out of a window. But if you’ve ever listened to any of our wildlife discussions or podcasts, you would know that that, unfortunately, is not the end of the potential problems that are going to be caused by squirrels. So before we dive into our inspection and how we would handle this problem, let’s talk a little bit about why squirrels or any other road in our wildlife would be an issue inside of your home, whether that be the living space, the attic space, the crawl space, wherever they may be. So since we’re talking about squirrels, if they make entry into your home, there’s always the potential for them to gnaw or chew on things, and that’s true with virtually any rodent on the planet. So for squirrels, rats, mice, doesn’t really matter. They’re always going to be chewing on something. And one thing that they always seem to search out and find that they always enjoy chewing on is electrical wiring. Why is that a problem? Because it’s electrical wiring. Definitely don’t want to have a house fire start somewhere in your home, in your attic from a rodent gnawing on those wires. It’s extremely important if you have a rodent issue, to get those animals out of your house as quickly as possible. So that’s kind of the worst case. But on top of that, you have the general mess that they make in your attic. They constantly go about throughout the day, foraging for different things to eat. They bring those items back and they store them in your attic. They eat on them in your attic. This can cause a huge mess. And not only that, but there’s the waste that comes from these animals pooping or peeing and just making their general home up there where they don’t need to be. So there’s several problems, but we’ve been able to help. For example, this customer in Dietz, Ville, Alabama, rid their attic space of these rodents. So after they called us, we set up an appointment. I went out there personally to inspect the property, and while I was on site inspecting the outside of the home, I could actually hear the rodent running around in the attic space close to the eaves. I could hear that rodent inside the attic. So that helped me pinpoint a couple of entry points around the house. If you watch our YouTube video, you’ll see that the gable vents on the side of the house actually are supposed to have a mesh wiring that keeps insects and rodents and different things birds out of the attic space, but still allows for ventilation, and there was just a gigantic hole in this attic Gable vent. I. Allowing these rodents to climb up the side of the house and directly into the attic. So we came back, we placed some traps, and there’s a little bit more detail in that YouTube video, if you’d like to see the type of traps that we used. We placed some traps over those entry points with bait on them, and lo and behold, we caught a squirrel. So you may be saying to yourself, Okay, I can do this. I can find the entry point. I can set a trap. I can catch a squirrel. What next? Well, once you catch a squirrel or whatever wildlife it is that’s getting into your attic, we always recommend resetting that trap or those...