Squirrel Wars

Last autumn, our granddaughter Eva, who was staying with us for several months, started complaining about the noise in the attic above her bedroom.

At first, I dismissed it as the usual small animal noises on the roof or even in the attic. My bedroom was next to hers and I wasn’t hearing anything out of the ordinary. After all, Eva had lived in town homes all her 22 years and wasn’t used to country life in an old (1871) clapboard farmhouse.

Back in 1971, after we bought our home, we told the contractor who was putting in a second floor bathroom that we were hearing animals in the walls rolling black walnuts.

The contractor, who had worked for the previous owners for decades said, “Oh, that’s the red squirrels. This place has always had them in the walls and attic. That’s why I built the squirrel cage in the attic.”

The squirrel cage is a six foot by 12 foot construction of stiff, fine wire mesh, hardware cloth in which we were instructed to store all items that squirrels might chew on or use as nesting material.

For two years the squirrels continued their lives in our home until my husband Bruce’s parents moved into our guesthouse. I mentioned the squirrels to Pop, and one day, when I came home from shopping, Pop pointed proudly to my clothesline. Hanging by their tails were two dead red squirrels that he had shot. That deed ended the rollicking in our walls and attic, and, in fact, the red squirrel population on our mountain.

Now, more than four decades later, Eva’s complaints continued. Finally, in mid-December, I too began to hear running feet above my ceiling. I wondered if the red squirrel population had recovered but had seen no sign of any in the woods. Then, on a dreary December 29 morning I heard a commotion in the attic. I opened the attic door in my study and saw not a red but an eastern gray squirrel peering down at me. It had used the juniper tree outside my study window as a springboard to the eaves where it had chewed a hole into the attic.

Our caretaker, Troy, repaired the eaves, but he worried that the squirrel might be trapped in the attic, so he set a live animal trap where I had seen the squirrel and baited it with shelled peanuts. The following morning I heard scrabbling in my bedroom ceiling. Troy had caught a squirrel in the trap. Later he released it several miles from our home and re-set the trap.

In the meantime, I battled gray squirrels at our three bird feeders hanging from our back porch and on the ground below where they gobbled up most of the birdseed I spread for the birds. Never in all the years we lived here had we had so many squirrels at our feeders. Our dozens of black walnut trees had had few black walnuts, and the acorn crop in our forest had been sparse for the second year in a row.

Meanwhile the squirrel wars continued in the attic. The peanuts were eaten night after night in the trap but no creature was caught. On the morning of January 13 I watched a squirrel climb the juniper tree, stopping occasionally to eat some snow. I alerted Bruce and he saw the squirrel leap on to the roof and come into the attic by way of a new hole it had chewed near the old, patched one.

Troy climbed the ladder to patch the new hole and carefully examined the eaves around the house for new holes but found none. Later, he returned with a trail camera tied to a heavy paint can that he put near the live animal trap. He baited the trap with a plastic cylinder peppered with small holes and filled with shelled peanuts.

At 2:00 a.m. I heard a squirrel run across my bedroom ceiling. The trap was not sprung and the cylinder was gone. I began to think we had Einstein squirrels in residence.

That evening Troy came by to check his camera. It looked as if three gray squirrels, one flying squirrel, and a short-tailed shrew had figured out how to get into the trap, grab the capsule and/or previously the peanuts, and escape without springing the trap.

I wasn’t too concerned about the flying squirrel. Apparently, southern flying squirrels sometimes live in attics, “gain[ing] access through windows, crevices under eaves, and similar apertures to the attics of homes,” according to one researcher as quoted in Flying Squirrels: Gliders in the Dark by Nancy Wells-Gosling, p.112. Probably they are the creatures that I do sometimes hear in the attic or walls, but their sounds can’t be compared to the noise of gray squirrels.

The short-tailed shrew, on the other hand, was a puzzle. They do eat plant food, including corn and beechnuts during the winter, and, judging by our attic shrew, shelled peanuts as well. Still these are burrowing animals not known to live in houses, although I once found one in a bucket in our basement.

The weather worsened with cold and snow, and we declared the attic war a stalemate. Troy’s last check of his trail cams showed only one flying squirrel left in the attic. Besides, it was dangerous for Troy to use the ladder, and we hoped his latest eave repair would deter any more destruction by the gray squirrels.

But the squirrel war outside continued. After an eight-inch snowstorm on January 19, followed by minus one degree Fahrenheit the next day, the birds and squirrels were desperate for food especially since ice-covered snow was as deep as a foot in the forest.

From two above zero on January 21, the temperature rose above freezing, and it rained for two days, and then the thermometer dropped to 22 degrees. Our feeders and the ground below was swamped by 15 bird species and at least seven hungry gray squirrels. They were joined in the dawn light by a large cottontail rabbit.

To give more ground-feeding birds a chance against the squirrels, I started throwing birdseed out on the frozen snow on the opposite side of the house near the veranda. This worked for a couple days until the squirrels caught on and managed to dominate both feeding areas. However, on the last day of January it was seven degrees below zero. Birds, especially the white-throated, song, and American tree sparrows and dark-eyed juncos, blanketed the ground below the back porch and on the veranda side, but the squirrels gave up earlier than usual.

The continual snow, rain, and freezing that characterized most of February brought more gray squirrels to the feeding areas. But most returned to their tree nests in the forest every evening. The two most aggressive ones stayed close to the food. One lived beneath our generator near the back porch and the other stayed in the juniper tree even when it was snowing hard. I assumed they were two of the original attic dwellers.

By February 23 we had 11 gray squirrels, and they began attacking our two tube feeders. One squirrel pulled out the plastic guards around the holes of a new red metal feeder I had received at Christmas and ate all the seeds. Never had I had to fight such determined and bold squirrels. Another climbed up our back porch storm door, trying to get inside late one morning while our son Dave was eating in the kitchen.

Finally, the squirrels defeated me, especially the three biggest, boldest pests that never quit for the day, and I removed the tube feeders, leaving only a much larger, relatively squirrel-proof feeder to feed the birds. Still, they mobbed the porch, and when I threw out pounds of mixed seeds for the birds, the squirrels ate most of it.

Our outdoor squirrel war continued even into mid-March, and I acknowledged utter defeat by the 11 squirrels that never left until the snow melted.

On the other hand, we never heard or saw another gray squirrel in the attic so you could say that our squirrel war of 2018-2019 was a draw.