It was about 3 weeks ago when I first heard it. The scratching. It was like 4 in the morning, and I heard scratching. I slight chill ran across the peach-fuzzy hairs of the back of my neck. I had a bad feeling about this.
The next evening, I heard it again, but this time in a completely different part of the house. Too big to be a mouse. Too hyperactive to be a raccoon. Yep, a squirrel.
So I got up into the attic. I had only stuck my head up there while we were looking at the house, and it wasn't a particularly pleasant place to be. It was an act of inhuman contortionism just to get through the hatch, then getting to the main attic made me feel like I was dodging lasers while robbing a bank. Between the nails protruding from the roof and the almost certain ceiling hole if I should miss a stud, it was a rather stressful place to be. I found a hole between the cathedral ceiling and the main attic and plugged it. Then I found the hole in the vent screen the rascal had been crawling through, and replaced the screen.
This marked the start of a Wile E Coyote / Road Runner relationship. I would try something new every couple of days, and he would find some way around it. I started out by putting a thick metal grate over the vent. Unfortunately, I managed to always install it when he was inside, and so he went crazy scratching at the wood to get out until I was forced to let him out. Then I went to the Depot and got some animal repellant spray (for gardens) and soaked the attic down. Still there the next day. I put up a tablet with a motion detector app to get video of him, and it just made me more furious to see him casually strolling about. I think he even mooned the camera once.
After the spray, it was a live trap. He managed to spring the trap, get the food, and get out a few times. Then he was wise to the trap and wouldn't go near it. I put out an electric trap, which he climbed around but never activated. I tried an ultrasound emitter. I put a bright spotlight in the attic 24/7. I put an alarm on the motion detector that would let off a siren every time he went through the vent. We even desperately kept rocks by the door just in case we saw him scamper by. But nothing seemed to phase him for long.
Finally, one fateful morning, I was eating breakfast when I saw him crawl down the side of the house and go out into the woods. That was my chance! I ran upstairs and installed the grate before he could come back in. I thought this would solve the problem, but for the next couple of days he would return every 15 or 20 minutes to claw at the vent; destroying the louvers and starting to work on the frame. It became clear that his tenacity matched that of my own. It was not going to be sufficient to just lock him out. He had to be removed from the premises: in a cage or in a paper bag.
I bought a bunch of old-fashion spring rat traps and put them all along the vent base and the path he used to get up there. He sprung most of them at one point or another, but it never stopped him. I even borrowed a bb-gun from one of the young men at church and camped out motionless by the vent, but he was to smart to fall for that. Nothing was going to work.
I started to think that maybe his tenacity was so strong because he was a she, with babies locked inside. I took apart the attic and crawlspace to find them without any luck. This guy was just intent on ruining my life and endangering my children for the shear fun of it.
So I finally copied a trap I had seen online on an animal control website. I cut a hole in my metal grate, wired the trap to the grate, and put some insulation in the trap so that he couldn't see that it was a trap. You can see my setup below. I made sure to plug every hole, and kept imagining him somehow getting back in. I was terrified that it would be all for naught, and even triple-plied the grate.
The next morning, this happened:
You can imagine the joy. The victory. The tears. I didn't think this day would ever come. In the wee hours of the morning, I wrapped the cage up in a towel, chucked him in my car, and drove off. We had a good heart to heart, squirrel and I. He told me that times were hard and he was in a dead end job. I told him why he just couldn't stay. We came to a bit of an agreement. I would like to say that I was man enough not to gloat, but I can't. I had won. The coyote finally caught the road runner. I drove a good 35 minutes away: past the freeway, behind a lake, through 5 or 6 towns. Then I let the bugger go. He bolted off without even a thank you. But I knew that his eyes were moist and glistening just like mine. It was finally over.
I felt a little hollow on the drive back. What now? It was like I was devoid of purpose. I had an empty hole in my life. How should I spend my mornings from 6-7, and evenings from 8-9? What did I do before the days when I would change into my grubby attic clothes and hunch near a vent contemplating my next move? Could I look at the squirrels in my front yard squabbling over petty things, and ever feel joy again? How do I go from an intense, mission-driven life bent on squirrel annihilation back to my days of innocence? And somewhere, I knew, he was crouched in the hollow of a non-descript tree in a non-descript forest, looking over the sun setting over the horizon, pondering the exact same thing.
