"Matt" wrote in message
...
On 12/29/2011 05:36 PM, Robert Green wrote:
"Matt" wrote in message

stuff snipped

RG I had one get into my
RG house when I was gone for a week. I came into the house, saw stuff
strewn
RG around, drapes pulled down and finally, when

Were you feeding the squirrels by any chance? Doesn't sound like it,
but ...

I knew a guy who had a 12-foot shack/cabin in the country, and he used
to feed the red squirrels. He went away for a week or more and returned
to find that the squirrels had gotten into the shack and turn things
upside down looking for food. Red squirrels are little and probably
didn't have much trouble squeezing through some little crevice into the
shack.

Nope. But my very close by next door neighbor does. It turned out that the
chimney didn't have a wire mesh cage on it and the old damper on the old
furnace had a swivel vane (almost exactly like Steve's pivot pipe,
ironically) that may have served as the access point. The source of that
incursion was never definitively found but there were no more incursions
after I had a fairly sturdy wire-cage chimney cap installed. That lasted
until the huge red maple out front got killed in one of the 100 year snow
storms we now have about every 10 years. They had pulled away a section of
siding, chewed through wood and insulation and got into the attic. Hearing
them skitter about at night was more than my wife could stand. The war was
on.

While my current method of dealing with them sounds fiendish, the neighbor's
five fully stocked and not effectively squirrel proofed birdfeeders are the
main problem. Rodents expand their families as the food supply expands.
There's a great episode of the Late Croc Hunter at a granary where there are
so many mice when they opened a bin chute, they ran out in a stream like
living water. And straight down his wife's blouse. Once my wife saw that,
the squirrel war heated up.

At first, I trapped them with peanut butter laced with Halcion, a sleeping
pill with an LD50 so high, a human has to eat over a thousand of them to
die. That was a tip I got from some squirrel research that wanted to catch
and band them. It was cheaper than buying traps at $30 a pop. But dealing
with doped up squirrels wasn't really a useful method for a homeowner so I
went to Ebay and got 3 double-ended squirrel traps. In the beginning I was
happy to take a drive to the park (near a great sub shop - hoagies not
boats) to relocate them. Then, the Incident occurred.

At that time, I still knew little about squirrels and some of their
remarkable capabilities. They can chew through plastic coated wire in very
short order. Burlap impedes them not at all. The guinea pig cage inside
TWO burlap bags I used to transport them was no barrier to a big adult male
with huge incisors. Driving 35mph with a very big, very crazed, escaped
squirrel in the van marked the beginning of my war on squirrels.

I'm basically a live and let live sort of guy until someone or something
invades my turf, climbs onto my head and whizzes on me with noxious squirrel
spurt. That's when things went from "Bambi" to "The Predator" in a few
short seconds. Yes, I know that's just instinct their instinct, but I have
my instincts, too. The feeling I had that night that I might soon die in a
car crash because I was trying to save a squirrel's life changed the
equation forever. Now I feel perfectly justified in quietly removing
squirrels from the gene pool that hang out around homes and not trees.

I learned something about them that day as he climbed up my back and onto my
head: squirrels seem to prefer to make their escape by instantly going for
altitude. The damage that was done in the house was primarily to the upper
shelves and a check of the spoor revealed he spent most of his time at the
windows or on a "elevated highway" he had mapped out. It wasn't until they
got into the attic that I learned a great deal about how they move around
inside a house.

When someone suggested that relocation might interfere with studies they
might be doing at the Agricultural research center, the whole concept got
redefined. My one-house Squirrel Relocation Service became the Squirrel
Population Control Service. There was some humor in it. The squirrel had
grabbed things like bags of cookies and knocked them to the floor, always
chewing into the bag where he saw a picture of the contents. I remember
looking at a bag of Chips Ahoy on the kitchen floor and seeing a hole where
the cookie picture had been. Then I realized that I was not burglarized,
but squirrelized.

--
Bobby G.