Attics are wonderful places for attracting wildlife. Mice love attics because they are full of nooks and crannies, and wonderful things to chew on. But mice are not the only rodents that manage to get the run of the attic. Squirrels are frequent visitors as well. Eradicating the squirrel population from your attic is a lot easier than removing the mouse population, but what I want to talk about today is taming wild squirrels. You may wonder why anyone would even want to tame wild squirrels in the first place, but as you read along you will discover for yourself the reason why.
Squirrels just love to uproot your domestic tranquility any way they possibly can, it doesn’t matter to them exactly how they go about it, just as long as they get the job done. They will cling to your window screens, thereby enabling them to do upside-down gymnastics for your amusement and giving them a chance to peek through the window at you at the same time. The fact that this routine also tears up the screens so that the bugs can fly merrily in all summer long, is just frosting on the cake to a squirrel.
Squirrels will also chew holes in your house and become part of the furnishings if you let them. This happened in my house once. I kept hearing the pitter-patter of little feet overhead any time of the day or night, and it was a much larger pitter-pattering than what one would expect of a creature the size of a mouse…so it was determined that the creature in question was either a very large rat or a squirrel. Either that, or a pack of children were up there playing Ring Around the Rosy. One or the other.
So a live trap was located and baited with something temptingly yummy….probably an apple or some other kind of fruit, because although squirrels will eat virtually everything, including pine cones, we like to think of them as having “healthy” appetites. Anyway, the trap was taken to the attic, where suddenly all was excruciatingly quiet and I could imagine myself surrounded on all sides by little staring eyeballs. Before long the trap was in place and I had visions of catching the offending party very soon and evicting said party out on said party’s caboose.
It was not long before the pitter-patter of little feet occurred again…this time culminating in a loud click, that signified that the trap had shut itself. Happily we all ran for the attic, and down we came with a trapped, and very frenzied, live squirrel. We took him out quite a ways into the woods and released him…and then re-set the trap and returned it to the attic to see if we could catch any other squirrels. We soon heard the pitter-patter of little feet again, running across the attic floor and the snapping sound came again. We had caught another squirrel!
We brought the trap downstairs again, and discovered that this particular squirrel was not quite as wild as the previous one. It was still fairly frantic, but it was not turning itself inside-out as the last one had. This struck us as peculiar because the original squirrel had behaved the way a wild animal should. So we took our weird little squirrel out into the forest and released it as we had done with the first one. It scampered away a little more slowly than the first squirrel had done, but it did scamper away.
We knew there were more than just two squirrels squirreled away in that attic though, so we brought the trap back upstairs and once again set it in the middle of the floor, then left the trap to do its work without us. Again, we heard the scampering of little feet up there, and again we heard the snap as the trap shut itself on its prey. We got the trap and were very surprised to discover an extremely tame squirrel inside the trap. It did not try to fight its way out, nor did it panic and try to bite the wire sides of the cage. It simply sat there, happily allowing us to carry it downstairs and out the back door to the woods. And that was when we figured out that we had not three, not two…but one lone squirrel calling our attic home.
That squirrel loved his repeated rides down from the attic in that cage and by the time we had discovered our error, the critter was a perfectly tame little beastie. He could have been a house pet by that time. This time, rather than releasing him into the wild again as we had done before…we kept him in the cage until we could find and fix the hole he kept getting in at. We actually found a lot of little holes in the side of the house, and repaired them all with thin strips of sheet metal. The house was fortified, and the little rascal was released into the wild again.
About ten minutes after the final release, there was a great amount of stomping, running, chewing and fussing taking place above our heads on the roof top. After several minutes the scurrying and complaining noises ceased and all was quiet again up North. The sheet metal had worked and we never again had a squirrel problem…well, until recently, that is…when a couple of them showed up inside the fireplace looking decidedly sooty. How they got in there was easily determined when I spotted them running up and down the inside of the chimney. It seems a wind storm had blown off the grating that had covered the chimney hole which had up until recently, prevented the return of the squirrels.
So the squirrels are back in town again…and they are finding new and unique ways of moving in and making themselves to home. I can’t help but wonder if any of them are particularly tame….perhaps that one very insistent squirrel who climbs the window panes and peeks in at us all the time. Or perhaps the one who climbs up a tall tree and drops pinecones on my head... Or perhaps they are one and the same.
