Now I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem, but I’ve got squirrels chewing the Christmas lights that are wrapped around my house. Every year I’ve dealt with them but never like this, the lights are stripped to the wire in some places, chewed at in others, and completely gnawed through in one or two! I couldn’t believe it when my daughter called to tell me that the lights had shut off after only a week of being up! It seemed unreal to me that any of the bulbs had gone out, but I crawled up anyway to check it out; and, very much to my surprise, I found them split in two right where the cable crossed underneath the pine next to my house. Well after that I had no doubt who the culprits were, after all, squirrels have just about the sharpest teeth you’ve ever seen.
Since I couldn’t just up and replace my lights every time one of the pests got their hands on them, I had to figure out a way to keep my lights in one piece, and the squirrels too. I tried the pigeon spikes, no luck; cutting the branches that hung over the house, they climbed up the stucco. After my ideas were all out the window, I took it to my most trusted advisor; Google. As it turns out, several other people had been dealing with squirrels chewing at their Christmas lights as well, but the universe was on my side. A man in Maine had just this problem, and had the solution for it as well.
So, following the tips I got on my favorite search engine, I ran some of the extra electric fencing I had left from my horse pasture along with the new lights, and plugged it in (on a very low setting). If it could keep my horses in the field, it could keep the squirrels off my lights! I kept my eye out for any funny business that night, and sure enough around 8 o’clock, my unexpected victim hopped from the tree to my roof. It sat next to the bulbs for a minute, looking around for any predators, before it grabbed at them, and BAM, just like Holly Holms and Rhonda Rousey, it was lights out for the squirrel! I haven’t had any problems since, but it might not have been the best way to deal with squirrels chewing on my Christmas Lights.