I have a pair of squirrels in my attic, and it is just as annoying as it sounds. You know when I moved up here to attend Utah State, I was expecting the wildlife. I have relatives from here and some of my friends do too, they all tell crazy stories about moose in their backyards and a bobcat in a tree house. I was pretty excited about those things, I’ve always wanted to hunt but California wasn’t exactly the best place for that. Well I can tell you with 110% pure honesty, that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, deer are everywhere, but I’m more concerned about hitting them in the dark than I am curious to look for them to find bucks; and moose are hardly ever seen near my house. But you know what wildlife you don’t have to leave your living room to see? Yep you guessed it: squirrels.
I know that college students don’t normally live in homes, but when I found a place that was cheaper to rent than an apartment or dorm, I was in all the way. I’m living off of Top Ramen I can’t exactly afford Grade A housing here. So I guess I should specify, I rent the top floor of my Great Aunt’s house, so I should say that there are squirrels in OUR attic. Since I’m the renter, she should be the one to take care of the issue, but since she’s 73 I’ve taken the burden on my shoulders. She was nice enough to let me live here for hardly anything, the least I can do is help with the squirrels in the attic, but I don’t have much experience. Some kids on campus have advised that I shoot them, but like I said I’ve never been hunting and I’m not the best shot. I tried setting up some of the cage traps you get at Home Depot, but I ended up catching my Aunt’s cat that was trying to eat the peanut butter inside.
At this point, I’m a little desperate. My Aunt is willing to pay for the removal services but I’m going to help, and the easier on the wallet it is the sooner I’ll hire. I’ll probably hire anyone really, these squirrels are driving me nuts! They run around all night long and keep me awake, and sleep is vital in my busy schedule. Not to mention when I went to find an old scrapbook for my Aunt, I saw all the damage that has been done so far, and it is extensive. Insulation is coming out the walls, wires are hanging loose, and there were holes in just about every box up there. That’s not mentioning the poop scattered around and the nests that were visible; basically, it’s disgusting. Anyone that would be willing to get these squirrels out of the attic sounds like the right man for the job. We just need them gone so I can go back to getting all the sleep possible.
Armadillos?
I’ve lived in Arkansas for a long time, since I was a kid actually, and I have never seen an armadillo in my yard until now. Occasionally I would see them on the side of the road or out in the woods, but I was shocked that there was one in my backyard! I noticed the holes around the yard and under my shed about a month ago, I thought it was my Chow Chow since she digs sometimes when it gets hot, but then they came back after I filled them in and one night I saw a small animal crawl under the shed. After that I was convinced that it was a raccoon but thought it odd because I had never had troubles in the past with them.
About a week or two ago I found the real culprit. I was out walking Zelda (my dog) early in the morning, around 6 o’clock, when we saw a big round rock digging in the yard. I unhooked the leash and let Zel chase it down, it wobbled away and I finally realized what was happening. I had an armadillo in my yard! A few days later I got an even bigger look at the picture when I spotted three small shapes following the larger one late at night out from under the shed. What I was dealing with was not one armadillo, but a family!
At this point I was stuck. While I was ruthless when I gamed online, I have a soft heart and didn’t want to hurt the animals. That’s when I found this website. I was excited to see that there were people that regularly dealt with things like this, it’s usually other animals but they do armadillos too! It was also good to know that the armadillos wouldn’t be hurt but released (I learned that after talking to a technician). I’ve already had an inspection done and tomorrow I’m getting help getting rid of the armadillos in my yard!
Baby + Skunk = No Good
Having a baby is stressful enough without having to deal with skunks under your porch. It makes things 10x worse actually, with the heightened sense of smell that comes from the extra estrogen in your system you might be able to imagine how the smell of skunk could get even more awful! Besides the fact that it just smells terrible, I’m also nauseous ALL THE TIME. I’m in my third trimester and this little tyrant crawling around in me loves nothing more than to make me sick (if I didn’t love him so much already it would make me mad). So imagine my distress when I woke up at 2 a.m. the other morning to the smell of skunk, a restless baby, and my gag reflex going off once the scent hit my nose!
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to the bathroom in time before a wave of vomit hit my mouth and since bending over isn’t my forte right now it was left to my husband to do the clean-up. Needless to say after that experience, he sent me to stay with my mother. This is her first grand baby so this skunk under my porch is freaking her out more than me. She’s worried that the smell could harm the baby or that it will attack me, I’m not concerned about the skunks affect to my health but I do want it gone as badly as she does. Ever since I got here she’s been fussing about my diet, how many times I’m going to the bathroom during the day, if my pants are too tight, and various other things a soon-to-be grandmother would fret over. It’s more exhausting than all the throwing up I do!
The joy of the staying with my mother dearest has so far proven short lived so I’ve been harassing Tony (my husband) at least twice a day about our situation. He’s tried to assure me that he’ll deal with the skunk under the porch and that the traps he bought and set will work soon. I’m not convinced and since my mom will barely let me out of bed I’ve been doing research on this thing (the skunk not the baby). There are professionals that do it for a living, who knew! I’m trying to get Tony to call one of them, I’m going to have this baby sooner than he’d like to admit and I want to go to my home, skunk free, sweet home once I pop him out.
Raccoons on the Loose
I’ve never had a problem with raccoons on my property, or at least until they started to be a problem, that is. I live in Colorado right near the forest and that itself warrants for a variety of wild animals to come around. I was okay with that for a long time, I mean I’ve lived here for 15 years and it’s never been an issue until now! About 6 months ago, two things happened in my life; I bought a new puppy and raccoons broke into the bird feed.
I know that raccoons are very resourceful creatures when it comes to finding food for them and their babies (and she has 3 pups), so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. My husband was the one who actually discovered the raccoons on the property (we already knew that they lived nearby). He was leaving for work at around 4 o’clock in the morning when he caught two raccoon’s red handed and elbow deep in the bird feeder. He ushered them away, but caught their tails slinking into the bushes the next day. He’s been bothering me to call someone ever since, but after that it was about 2 more months before we had another run in with the raccoons.
Now the 3 babies are more like adults, bigger than my dog, and MUCH more active. My husband has started seeing them on an almost regular basis in the morning here and there, mostly minding their own business. We weren’t having problems with them breaking into any of the bird or dog food so we more or less let them be; until I left the lid on the dog food off. Well, not off exactly, usually we chain the top on so that the raccoons can’t get in, but I forgot. Now my husband is back on my case about calling in the Calvary so I’ve been looking around. I was recently in touch with a technician so hopefully I can get someone to relocate the raccoons off my property and somewhere far, far away.
Pesky Pigeons
Having pigeons on your roof is a hassle no doubt about it, but I thought getting rid of them would have happened a completely different way. Pigeons have always been a problem in Utah (surprise! I’m not from NYC) which you wouldn’t think of as a problem animal here but it is. I’m the landlord for an apartment building here in Sandy and I have more complaints about pigeons than I do about wolf spiders! Well finally I decided I had to do something more because the bird spikes didn’t seem to be affecting the pigeon population at all! So I took to the internet to find help.
I typed ‘Pigeon problems in UT’ into the search bar and the second thing to pop up was AllstateAnimalControl.com and, after confirming the job, I was contacted by a technician. I told him about the pigeons on the roof and all the troubles they caused and I must have gotten excited because I do recall saying something along the lines of “You can shoot them for all I care!” Well my 13 year old son must have heard that because he took it very literally. I received more calls that day than any other and I couldn’t believe what they were calling about.
A month earlier my husband took Josh to get his hunting license, last week they went dove shooting and I heard Josh was quite the shot. It turns out that he was just as good as he said he was. After hearing my comment about the pigeons, he decided that he would take care of the pigeons on the roof himself and save me money (or at least I hope that’s what he was thinking). Do you see where this is going? He and his best friend took their small .22 caliber rifles across the street to a gas station, and proceeded to pick off every pigeon one by one. Well they only got through about 12 before I got a call from both the cops and just about every tenant in the building telling me what was going on. Oh I was livid! Not only did I have to pay a fine for them shooting a gun in public, but I still had to pay to get the pigeons off the roof! My advice is this: if you have pigeon problems, don’t let your son hear about it!
Skunked
Having a skunk under your house is a nightmare! And not one of the ones where you feel uncomfortable but you don’t really know what’s happening and you wake up easily; no it’s a nightmare that overloads all of your senses, sight, touch, sound, SMELL, and it’s one where even when you pinch yourself, you don’t wake up. If you do happen to wake up, you don’t find relief, or at least that’s what happened to us. Living on a farm in Wyoming, I know that there are skunks around and I’ve seen one wandering here and again, but golly this was a different experience. I was literally asleep having a nightmare about a fight and there was scratching and growling and then there was green fog and an awful smell, and when I woke up two of those things remained: and it wasn’t the green smoke.
Well luckily my husband Neil has a friend who does things like this for a living. We wouldn’t get any sort of discount, but it was nice that we knew him and could trust him to do the job right. He came and did an inspection while we moved out to the guest house until the smell (and hopefully the skunk) was gone. He came back to us with bad new, it wasn’t just ONE skunk under our house, but a whole family! The good news was that he could get them out. He set up a trap outside the whole that wouldn’t let the animal get back underneath the house once it left. That worked great for parents, but the babies were trickier. Since they were on the edge of the house though, he made a small pen outside the trap so when the little ones came out they were ours for the removing.
I have never been so thankful for someone in my life. Not only did he get rid of the skunks, but he recommended and taught us how to use an odor control to get rid of the awful skunk smell. Having your nightmares become a reality is never a good experience, but with how smoothly everything was taken care of it was hardly a bother. Plus, staying somewhere other than our house was like a mini vacation! Overall I’m just so happy that we were able to take care of the problem before it became a PROBLEM and that there are no longer skunks under my house.
“Come on Robin, to the Bat Cave!”
To say I have a ‘little’ bat problem, is a BIG understatement. We bought a new house in June completely expecting it to be run down and have issues, we specifically like this property because it other buildings around it that we could use or tear down. We were ready for work and prepared for rickety, but we never thought we were buying the bat cave! After the final signings and the house becoming officially ours, it took us about a month to get out to it to see exactly what we bought (we didn’t check before because we planned on rebuilding anyway). When we got there, we realized we took on what could be an impossible fight.
The property had a bat problem like I have never seen in my life, the floors in ALL of the buildings are littered with guano and what I thought was black paint on the ceiling was really the oils from the bats covering everything! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, luckily there weren’t any bats there at the time, though I’m not sure where they went, but it was obvious they had been occupying the space. Well my wife and I agreed that while we did love to see wild bats, we did NOT want to live with them. We could deal with old wallpaper, cracked floors, and an assortment of broken things and maybe even holes in the roof, but we couldn’t deal with this bat problem on our own.
We called the insurance immediately and asked what they would be willing to help us with. They told us that there was nothing they could do unless a professional would come do an inspection. Well prior to this I didn’t know that there were people who specialized in bat problems like ours, but there’s someone to do everything I guess. We got in touch with a “trapper” who agreed to make the trip out to American Fork to help us out with our ‘little’ issue. Hopefully everything they find convinces the insurance that they need to help us with our BIG bat problem.
Santa Claws
It was right around Christmas time that we had a raccoon in our chimney, the reason I remember is because I was making a Christmas dinner for my in-laws who were coming to town the next day. I started the turkey that night before so the house had started to smell like Thanksgiving all over again, there is no better smell than turkey in the oven, and the raccoon must have agreed. I had been hearing a few strange sounds in the chimney here and there for a few days before the incident, but I was so stressed with the company that was coming that I just ignored it!
As I was getting ready for bed, I heard a metal creaking from the living room so I went to check it out, but there was nothing there so I shrugged it off and went to sleep. Later that night I woke up and heard movement and rustling downstairs, but I attributed it to the dog (that was lying next to the bed) and again went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning I couldn’t believe what I came downstairs to find. The raccoon in the chimney had opened the damper and went full Terminator on the house! The couches were shredded and torn, there was pee in more than one spot on the carpet, and the turkey had been taken out of the oven and picked clean! I wanted to cry but instead I got to work.
It was the first time that I had my in-laws at my house for any sort of dinner, so you can see why I was so stressed out. My brain was stuck on the tangent that if my house and food weren’t perfect that they would shame our marriage (don’t we all think that way?) so I called my best friend up and put her, her husband, and my husband to work in the fastest Extreme Home Makeover ever. We replaced the torn up furniture with new couches, shampooed the pee stained carpets, closed the damper and blocked the chimney, cleaned the house top to bottom getting rid of all the evidence of a raccoon, and bought steaks for dinner all before the in-laws arrived. After they had left, we got to dealing with the raccoon in the chimney.
Rat Pack
Two days ago, I caught a rat under my house. Last week I could hear sounds under the floor when I was in the basement and since I had troubles with mice a couple years back, I immediately assumed that they were back. I set out two of your regular snap traps and waited. I was totally caught off guard when I checked the traps to find one had a rat in it! The only experience I’ve ever had with rats was when I watched Ratatouille and this was NOTHING like that.
Since I’m so inexperienced with the new breed of rodent I was dealing with, I went out and did what any sane house owner would do and asked Google. The many people on the internet seemed to talk about a couple of common facts:
1. If there’s one rat, there’s usually going to be more
2. You have to take them out one rat at a time
3. Hire someone else to deal with it
Well since I am only interested in doing what’s best for me and will best take care of the rats under my house I’ve started researching what kind of company’s can deal with these things. That’s where I found your website.
I called Allstate Animal Control yesterday and gave them my story and information. I was contacted THIS MORNING by a ‘trapper’ that is coming to my house this afternoon. I was surprised that this entire scenario could be addressed so soon, but I guess when you call the best you get the best, or at least I hope. Hopefully they can get rid of the rats under my house as quickly as they got ahold of me!
Squirrel Problem
It took me a long time to admit that I had a squirrel problem. When I was young and in college I was an animal right’s activist, so I had a hard time accepting that it was really an issue and that an animal could be anything less than friendly. Back in the day I would have walked into a field of bears and expected them not to hurt me, but now (I hope) I’m a little bit more educated than that. I watched the squirrels jump from the tree onto my roof and crawl into the eve more than once, but what’s mine is theirs as my younger self would’ve said.
I think I was trying to reconnect with my past, liberal self when I ignored the scratching and other various sounds from the attic that would make their way to my ears. I don’t know what I was thinking when I waved off the horrible smell of urine and bought a new Glade air-freshener instead, but I do know what I was thinking when I opened the attic door and saw (and smelled) exactly what I had been letting happen in my house. The first thing that I thought was a little explicit, but the next was that I, Susanne Richards, had a squirrel problem.
When I called Allstate Animal Control about the issue, my inner teenager screamed ‘Human freedom, animal rights, one voice, one fight’ like I used to chant in college, but I pushed her down and continued with the process. Pretty soon I had a technician in my home setting up traps, then he was back a few days later to remove the squirrels and help me clean up the mess. After all was said and done, my inner activist was silent and pleased. No squirrels were hurt and my house didn’t smell like an outhouse. Allstate Animal Control fixed my squirrel problem, and saved my attic while they were at it!