Squirrels in the Attic: How to Get Them Out Before They Chew Through Wiring
By Jacob Ingledue
Table of Contents
By Jacob Ingledue
If you are hearing scratching above the bedroom ceiling early in the morning and again just before dark, it is almost certainly squirrels, and the reason to act this week rather than next month is that everything they chew up there is either structural or electrical. Squirrels do not settle into an attic quietly and wait. They gnaw, because their front teeth never stop growing and wearing them down is not optional for the animal, and the material closest to hand in a Missouri attic is wiring insulation, roof decking, and the wooden framing that holds your roof up.
We get called about this every autumn across Springfield, Ozark, Nixa, and up through the Kansas City side, and the calls follow a pattern. Somebody hears a noise for a week and hopes it stops. It does not stop. By the time we get up there, a hole that started the width of a quarter has been worked into something a grown squirrel walks through without slowing down.
The single most useful thing you can do before you call anybody is pay attention to when you hear it. Squirrels are daytime animals. They leave at first light to feed, and they come back in the late afternoon, so the noise clusters around dawn and dusk and goes quiet in the middle of the day when the attic is empty. That timing is the giveaway.
Mice are active after dark and their noise is lighter, more of a skitter than a thump. Raccoons are heavy enough that you hear them as footsteps rather than scratching, and they work at night. Bats leave and return at dusk in a way that looks like a stream, not a single animal. If the sound is at three in the morning, you are not dealing with squirrels.
The other thing squirrels do that nothing else does is roll things. They cache nuts, and an attic floor is a hard surface, so you hear an object being dragged and then dropped. Homeowners describe it as somebody moving furniture in the ceiling. That is a squirrel putting food somewhere it thinks is safe.
Walk the perimeter of the house in the middle of the day and look up at the roofline, particularly where two rooflines meet, at the corners of soffits, at gable vents, and anywhere a tree branch comes within jumping distance. You are looking for a roughly round opening with the edges chewed rather than broken. Chewed edges look worked and slightly pale where the weathered surface has been taken off. Around a real entry point you will often see the surrounding wood rubbed smooth and darkened from the animal going in and out.
Gable vents are the most common way in on the houses we see. The louvers are usually a thin material, the screen behind them is often thinner still, and a squirrel that wants in has all day to work on it.
Squirrels do not hibernate. They stay active all winter, which means they need somewhere insulated and dry to sit out a cold snap, and they start looking for it well before the weather turns. An attic is warm, it is above ground, it is dry, and nothing that hunts a squirrel can follow it in there. From the animal’s point of view it is the best available option by a wide margin.
There is a second wave in late winter and early spring when females look for somewhere to have a litter. That matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it, because a nest with young in it changes what can legally and humanely be done and it changes the timeline.
If you are hearing them now, before the first hard freeze, you are actually in the better half of this problem. The population up there is smaller, the damage is newer, and there is no litter to work around.
The wiring is the part that should move this up your list. Squirrels strip the insulation off cable to get at nothing in particular, because the chewing is the point rather than the target, and what is left behind is bare conductor sitting against wood and against blown insulation. That is a fire risk in a part of the house nobody looks at, and it is a fire risk that will not announce itself until it is a real problem.
Beyond the wiring, the damage runs in a fairly predictable order. They compress and foul insulation, which quietly costs you on heating through the whole winter. They chew roof decking and framing. They bring nesting material in, which is dry and combustible and sits directly on top of everything else. Urine and droppings soak into insulation and eventually into drywall, and once that has gone on long enough you are replacing ceiling rather than cleaning it.
Water damage is the one people do not expect. A chewed entry hole at a roofline is also a way in for rain. We have opened up attics where the squirrel problem had been solved months earlier by somebody else and the hole was still open, and the real cost by then was the soaked decking around it.
I would rather tell you honestly what does not work than let you spend a weekend on it.
Sealing the hole while they are inside. This is the most common mistake and it is the most expensive one. A squirrel sealed into an attic does not give up and quietly die somewhere convenient. It chews its way back out, and the new hole is somewhere worse than the old one, often through a soffit into the wall cavity. If there are young up there, you have sealed them in without their mother, and you will be opening the ceiling to get them out.
Repellents, ultrasonic devices, and lights. An animal that has decided your attic is the warmest place available is not going to be argued out of it by a smell or a noise. The most that usually happens is that they move to the far end of the attic, which makes them harder to reach and tells you nothing about whether they left.
Poison. This is the one where I will be blunt. Poison in an attic gives you a dead animal inside a wall or under insulation, in a spot you cannot reach without cutting into something, in a house you have to live in while it decomposes. It also puts bait in a space where it can reach a pet or a bird of prey that takes the carcass. We do not use it for squirrels and I would encourage you not to either.
There is a real trade-off in all of this and it is worth naming. Doing it properly takes longer than sealing a hole. It involves getting the animals out first, confirming the attic is actually empty, and only then closing it up, and that sequencing is most of the work. The fast version is the one that costs more later.
Between hearing them and getting somebody out, there are three things worth doing and one worth not doing. Write down the times you hear movement for a couple of days, because that record tells us more about how many animals are up there than a single visit does. Keep the attic hatch closed, particularly if it opens into a hallway. Move anything stored up there that you would mind losing, if you can reach it without going far in. And leave the opening alone, however tempting it is to put something over it.
The first step is finding every way in, not the obvious one. Squirrels commonly use one main entrance and keep at least one other opening available, and a job that closes the front door and leaves the back door open has not accomplished anything. That means going over the whole roofline, the soffits, the vents, the gable ends, and the roof and wall junctions, and then getting into the attic to look at the same points from the inside where daylight shows through.
Once we know the openings, the animals come out through a one-way door fitted over the main entrance. It lets a squirrel leave on its own schedule and does not let it back in. That is the humane part and it is also the practical part, because an animal that leaves under its own steam is not an animal cornered in your insulation.
Then there is a waiting period, and this is where the work needs patience rather than speed. The attic has to be confirmed empty before anything is sealed. That means going back, checking, and being willing to leave the door on for longer if the evidence says something is still up there.
Young squirrels cannot leave through a one-way door. They are not mobile enough, and a one-way door in that situation separates a mother from her young and creates a far worse problem than the one you started with. When there are young, they have to be removed by hand and reunited with the mother outside so she can move them to another site herself, which she will do. That work is slower, it costs more, and there is no version of it that can be rushed. It is also the main reason we would rather deal with an attic in October than in March.
Getting them out is half the job. If the openings are repaired with something a squirrel can chew, you will be doing this again next year, and squirrels return to sites that worked for them before.
Repairs need to be in material the animal cannot work through, fastened so it cannot be pulled loose at the edge, and they need to cover the weak points rather than just the hole that was used. Gable vents need proper screening behind them. Soffit and roofline junctions need closing where they gap. Any chewed decking wants replacing rather than patching over, because the damaged wood is now the softest thing on the roof and it is where the next animal will start.
The one piece of this you can genuinely do yourself, and should, is the trees. Branches that overhang the roof or come within a jump of it are the highway. Cutting them back is the single most effective long-term change most homeowners can make, and it is the only part of this I would encourage you to handle without us.
When we come out for squirrels, we start with a full inspection of the roofline and the attic so that what follows is based on where the animals are actually getting in rather than on a guess. We remove them humanely, using exclusion rather than poison, and we work around a litter properly if there is one. We close the entry points in materials that hold, and we tell you plainly what we found in the insulation and the wiring, including the parts that are an electrician’s job rather than ours.
Squirrel removal is one of the services we run across Springfield, Marshfield, and the Kansas City area, and the inspection that starts it is free. If you are hearing something above the ceiling at dawn, that inspection is the right first step, and it is worth taking this week rather than after the first freeze.
Scratching at dawn and dusk with a middle-of-the-day silence is squirrels, and the clock on it is set by the wiring rather than by the noise. Do not seal the hole while they are inside, do not put poison in an attic you live under, and do not expect a device to talk them out of a warm space in October. Get them out through a one-way door, confirm the attic is empty before closing anything, and repair the openings in something they cannot chew. Cut the branches back afterward and you have solved it rather than postponed it.
Getting them out is the easy part. A squirrel will chew back in within days if the entry isn’t sealed, and a mother will tear through a patched gap to reach her young.
Book a free inspection. We’ll find how they’re getting in, get them out, and seal the attic so they can’t return. No charge, no obligation.
How long does it take to get squirrels out of an attic?
Most jobs without young run over a small number of visits rather than a single one, because the one-way door needs time to work and the attic has to be confirmed empty before it is sealed. A situation with a litter takes longer and cannot be shortened safely.
Will they leave on their own once it gets warm?
Some individuals move on in spring, but the openings stay, the damage stays, and the site is now a known good spot that gets reused. Waiting mostly buys you a bigger repair.
Is it safe to go up into the attic myself to look?
Looking from the hatch with a flashlight is reasonable. Going all the way in is not something we would recommend when there is a live animal up there and possibly chewed wiring underfoot, and neither is handling nesting material without protection.
Can I just use a trap from the hardware store?
Trapping brings in questions about what is legal to do with the animal afterward, and it does nothing about the entry points, which are the actual problem. A trap that catches one squirrel out of several also leaves you certain the job is done when it is not.
What if I hear it in the wall rather than the ceiling?
That usually means an animal has come through a soffit and dropped into a wall cavity, and it sometimes means one that cannot get back out. It is worth calling sooner rather than later, because the outcomes there are either a rescue or a removal from inside the wall.
Do squirrels come back to the same house?
Yes, and so do their offspring. That is why the repair matters as much as the removal, and why overhanging branches are worth cutting even after the attic is closed up.
How do I know whether the wiring has been chewed?
You often cannot tell from a quick look, because the damage is under insulation and behind framing. We flag what we can see during the inspection, and anything involving live conductors is work for a licensed electrician rather than for us.
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