Eric: So we have Travis here from All City Animal Trapping and Travis covers the South Bay area for animal trapping animal removal. There seems to be a lot of calls coming in from Long Beach for squirrel removal and wanted to get your take on that Travis.
All City Animal Trapping: Absolutely. Yeah. I have seen an uptick in calls probably over the last couple of years as it concerns squirrels in Long Beach.
And the scenario I’m seeing the most often is people think they have rats in their attic. But when I talk to them, when I get out to the house, the symptoms are inverted. So rather than hearing them all night and it being quiet during the day. They hear him during the day. And it’s quiet all night because rats are nocturnal, squirrels are dire most.
So they’re up during the day. So once I kind of hear that, I kinda know what’s going on. Especially when we get to February through April, that timeframe in Long Beach. I’m asking those very specific questions. Are you hearing it during the day or are you hearing it at night? And depending on their answer, it’ll help guide me in the right direction. But squirrels always like to be high and at almost all of these jobs and I’m thinking of a few specifically they’ve chewed their way through an eve, a baseboard along the roof or through a vent.
And they’ve now gotten into the attic. And they’ve taken a bunch of insulation and bunched it up in a corner to create a really, really good nest. Installation works amazing at insulating. A nest does the same thing, so it keeps those babies nice and warm. And once February hits, you’ve got to be very very careful sealing up the perimeter of the property without doing a thorough inspection of that attic.
Because those babies are in that time for the squirrels are just little pinkies, they look like little potatoes. They’re really tiny little things, and they’re not going to squeak. They’re not going to make a ton of noise. So if mothers out during the day, or you’ve scared her out or whatever the case may be, and you go and just make sure if you’ve seen any clumps insulation.
Well, that’s my job. What I’ll be doing is breaking those close the insulation apart to make sure that there’s no babies in there. The last job that I had in Long Beach, what we ended up doing when we found the babies in the attic is I kept the nest together and I put it in a box.
Made sure the mom was out. She kept trying to come back in. So I kept pushing her out of the vent opening that she wanted to come in from. Because she wants to check on her baby’s shoes or really good mother. I’m using my pull to push her out the opening Once I’ve done that, I transitioned outside with the little babies in a box.
I seal the opening up so she can’t get back inside. And then from there, it’s just finding a place to show the mother, hey I have your babies. Sometimes you can do a little gentle pressure on the babies and they’ll squeak. The mother will perk up immediately and then you just want to put the babies in a place where hawks aren’t going to get to them. Cats and dogs or raccoons or things like that aren’t going to get to them. Now, those babies don’t have any fur, so they need that box that you put them in to be insulated. But squirrel moms are great. Moms are going to come back for those babies and when they do, stuffed the whole baby in their mouth. Just like they would a nut and then they’ll take off, run into find their new den site.
And it’s really cool to see. It’s a kind of rewarding that we get to get them out and keep the family together. I’d like to do that as often as possible. But yeah I was just dealing with this two days ago in Long Beach, they were getting in-between the Spanish tiles on a roof. Now these were more adult squirrels, but of course I did the full inspection, assuming that they have the babies.
Cause from February to April might as well, just assume it. If you see a squirrel going into your attic, there is the chance that it’s going to have babies. This is their season. This is when the females are in heat. So I ended up, there was no babies. There was a mother with last years so they were getting in through the broken Spanish tile. Ended up being able to scare them all out and then see lifted Spanish tile.
The cool thing is they’re still in their area that they understand. They just need to find a new place to live. So the protocol would start with going up into the attic and either identifying that there is a squirrel there or there isn’t or what type of animal it is. We’re assuming it’s a squirrel. From there you can try and push them out and seal it up. Or you can trap them, squirrels are very, very easy to trap. Put some peanut butter or some nuts in a trap. They get caught very quickly. And then you can take the school if you want to take it somewhere and let it go or something like that. And you’re doing that with the babies.
The only thing I would say is don’t put the babies in the trap with the mother. The squirrels get frantic when they get caught and sometimes they can trample the babies. They don’t understand, they don’t, they don’t know that that’s what they’re doing. So transport them independently, but the mothers are really good moms.
They will come back for the babies. They will go up a tree and just watch you from the top of the tree to make sure that you’re putting their babies down. But yeah, that’s basically it. You can use repellents as well in the attic spaces. They’ve worked okay to push the mothers out. Sometimes I worry that with the repellents that they’re not going to come back and get the babies, but so far they have every time.
So I’m impressed with that as well that those mothers are so tenacious. But if you hear something up in your attic and it sounds extremely active during the day, that’s opposite of a rat. So it might be a squirrel that’s in your attic.
Eric: All right. So you cover from El Segundo all the way down to Palos Verdes, back to Torrance and Long Beach. If anyone is interested or has an issue with squirrel removal or animal removal of all types, animal trapping, give All City Animal Trapping a call. You could go to their website allcityanimaltrapping.com and all of their contact information is there. Thank you so much Travis.