Squirrel Proofing

Not long after we moved into our house Marc and I awoke to the sound of something running around in our attic. Hoping it wasn't rats Marc headed upstairs to check it out and returned to let me know that we had a squirrel in our attic. It appeared that he would enter and leave at different points during the day, but as far as we could tell he wasn't calling our attic home. We also couldn't figure out how the heck was he getting in and out of the attic.

Squirrel picture from here

Then one day as I was walking through the kitchen I peered out the kitchen door towards the screened porch and to my surprise, there was the squirrel. Inside the screened porch! After shooing him away and inspecting the screened porch I finally realized how our little visitor was getting into our attic. You see there was a small hole in one of the screens about the size of a half dollar coin and holes in the netting that covered the vent hole between the screen porch and the attic. Basically the squirrel could just waltz in and take all the insulation he wanted.

So off to Home Depot we went! We bought screening to replace the screen the squirrel had already chewed through. It turned out to be a very easy job but in the day after we replaced that he quickly chewed another hole in the next screen over. So we re-screened that panel as well and then went big. We bought some hardware cloth to cover the outside of the screens, something he would not be able to chew through.

And for good measure we trimmed the tree outside the screened porch so he could no longer use it as his ladder to the windows. As you can see in the picture below it also gave us a much better view of the valley.

Before - the tree covered most of the window.
After - you can only just see the tops of the tree at the bottom of the window. 

Being the curious little squirrel that he is he returned to inspect our work. (I apologize if it's hard to see the little guy in this video, I was standing as still as possible behind a closed window with a screen to capture his antics.)

Adventures of a Curious Squirrel from Christina A on Vimeo.

Thankfully the hardware cloth has deterred our persistent visitor and now he spends his days running around our yard, investigating the wood pile and finding nuts to bury for the winter. He has yet to chew through another screen nor has he figured out how to get around the hardware cloth.

Aquilas - 1, Squirrel - 0