I thought I’d take care of the squirrel in the attic on my own, but I had no idea I’d end up with dead baby squirrels in the wall.
I’d discovered I had a squirrel in the attic one day when I heard some noises, went to investigate, and found the evidence. Some of the attic insulation had been pushed down to next to nothing, there were droppings everywhere and a nasty smell, and the boxes we used to store our stuff had been chewed through. The quilt my grandmother made had some of the stuffing pulled out of it, and some of the books and papers we had stored up there were trashed.
My husband’s been stressed out at work, so a squirrel in the attic was the last thing I wanted him to have to deal with. He’d survived his company’s layoffs, but he now had to work twice as hard without extra pay to cover the work that was normally done by three people. I decided not to tell him about the squirrel in the attic until I’d solved the problem.
Early in the morning, about the time I usually heard the noises in the attic, I armed myself with a hammer, nails, and chicken wire, and waited quietly outside watching the roof line. Sure enough, after about 25 minutes of waiting and watching, a squirrel squirmed out of a small gap next to the attic vent and jumped up into a nearby tree branch. I grabbed the ladder, and spent the next two hours climbing, swearing, sweating and trying not to fall while I hammered ugly chicken wire over the gap.
Problem solved. Husband none the wiser.
About two months later, I started to smell a nasty smell in my son’s bedroom. I made him clean it, then I cleaned it properly while he was at school. I still couldn’t find anything. I spent the good part of an afternoon sniffing around, and finally determined the smell was coming from inside one of the walls. Yet another problem I didn’t want to add to my husband’s burdens.
I ended up cutting away a small square of the wall, put the flashlight setting on my cell phone, turned its camera on, and stuck my phone inside the wall so I could figure out what was going on.
Dead baby squirrels were inside the wall.
I must have sealed up mama squirrel’s access to my attic, without knowing there was a nest with baby squirrels in there. Apparently they squirmed around and fell down inside the wall. I could only see two of them. I hoped there weren’t more.
I think it just might be time to involve my husband. Unless . . . I could get Allstate Animal Control out here in the next day or two and they could get the dead baby squirrels out of the wall. Maybe, just maybe, my husband doesn’t have to deal with yet another problem.
