Squirrels tend to infest attics for various reasons. This can include a pregnant female looking for a safe place to raise her children to adulthood, which takes a full year from birth and can result in your attic being destroyed. The squirrel may be a male looking for a crash pad while he collects nuts and looks for females to mate with. The mating ritual for squirrels happens on two days. One at the beginning of the summer, one near the middle of the fall. They are only in heat for that single day twice a year. They must mate with as many males as they can and then quickly find a place to live while pregnant and to give birth. Squirrels of all kinds make consistent noises in your attic. The babies are motionless and blind for the first four weeks and they do not make much noise until they are at least 4 months old. So what you will be hearing is the squirrel leaving the attic in the very early morning and then returning relatively late at night or around sundown. They are much more powerful and destructive than most people realize, often thinking of them as cute. They are not. They are rodents with incisors that grow throughout their life and like rodents, they will chew on everything in your attic until the place falls apart. They will defecate and urinate all over the attic, rip out insulation to make their nest and drag in not just nuts and berries but garbage and even dead animals like mice. Squirrels are omnivores and will eat anything they can find. They are also very athletic being able to climb all but the sheerest surfaces in seconds. A brick wall can be scaled so fast you may not even see the squirrel for a blur.
They can chew straight through almost any building material but brick. They can break through wood like it is nothing and chew through the aluminum siding and even soffits. They have a bit of strength of seven-thousand pounds per square inch. For comparison, a human average bite power is seventy pounds per square inch. That means a squirrel could easily bite your hand at the wrist. That also means they can chew through absolutely anything from slate roof tiles to large support structures and even old concrete. There is little that can stop them aside from solid steel. They can even push bricks out of the way to enter an attic through a chimney. The reason they are so interested in the attic is that it is the most well-built structure in your home. It is meant to control the humidity and temperature of the whole house while ventilating the air you breathe in your home. The attic is always dry and always ventilated with fresh air. A well-built attic is a joy to be in for a squirrel. Warm and soft insulation in an unfinished attic is the cream of the crop of living spaces for all wild animals. Since they have no interest at all in your human food, aside from the garbage and whatever food is left outside they can stay in the attic often unnoticed for months or even years. Seeming only to be a squirrel that eats out of your garbage without realizing it’s dragging that garbage into your attic.
Squirrels are also able to speak in an ultrasonic frequency that humans cannot hear. so they can warn each other if one of them hears or sees a human.
Getting them out of your attic is very difficult. It involves going up onto the roof and sealing all of the entryways they made, of which there are always many. You will then have to find the main entryway the squirrel used to enter the attic. This will allow the squirrel to exit the attic and will then lock, stopping them from getting back in. An intent squirrel will continue making holes and keep trying to get into your attic so you may have to go through the process all over again. If this happens often it may be worth calling professional wildlife technicians who can do the work and offer an extended warranty so they can keep coming back and removing squirrels from your attic.
