Last Thursday, Sioux Eagle returned to her West Tisbury house following one week out of state. But the house was not as she had left it. Wooden spoons and a broken bottle littered her kitchen, and bric-a-brac was scattered about the living room. In the sunroom, she discovered plants and more items knocked over. A prized night-blooming cereus was mutilated, and several seed balls for feeding songbirds were partly eaten. That’s when her Australian shepherd, Elfie, detected the source of the destruction, hidden in the rows of potted plants. “Elfie started sniffing behind the plants in quite a determined, interested fashion,” Ms. Eagle said in a text to The Times, “and it drew my attention to a bushy tail.”
Ms. Eagle initially thought the tail belonged to a skunk. She forced her dog out of the sunroom and closed the door to avert an olfactory disaster.
“I decided to take a cautious second look, minus Elfie, and discovered that the tail in question was gray, not black and white,” she said.
Using a piece of driftwood, Ms. Eagle prodded at the tail. Out sprang a gray squirrel. The rodent raced along the wall, crying out what she described as “a continuous string of indignant insults”; it knocked over a few more plants and hid again. More prodding with the sunroom door open drove the squirrel out of the house.
As she was prepared to clean up, Ms. Eagle discovered the squirrel’s worst handiwork. Gnaw marks ran randomly along the edges of the French doors and casement windows in the sun room. The moulding was all but gone in those places.
Rodent rampage
Walter Wlodyka, a licensed Problem Animal Control (PAC) agent with more than 30 years of experience, said homeowners shouldn’t expect the hilarity of the squirrel scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation when they encounter a squirrel in a house. In closed quarters, “they’re biters,” and “they’re like lightning,” he told The Times.
Mr. Wlodyka said the severity of the winter has taken a toll on squirrels.
“This winter has driven them over the edge” as far as trying to get inside, “which they love to do anyway,” he said, noting that though attics and eaves are their favorite haunts, squirrels are not averse to scurrying down a chimney in search of heat and food.
After realizing her flue was open, Ms. Eagle concluded the chimney was how the squirrel gained access to her house.
Mr. Wlodyka said once inside a house, after a snack or two, squirrels can panic.
“It will go to a window, and it will look out the window, and it will chew the sash out thinking it will get out that way. Obviously it has trouble getting out, so it goes to the next window, and the next window and the next window,” he said.
Mr. Wlodyka recommended two preventive measures to protect a home against squirrels: Keep the flue or damper of a fireplace tightly shut when not at home, and take care when bird feeding.
“With birdfeeders, you have to prevent seed from hitting the ground,” he said. “If you don’t do this, then you will be attracting animals of all sorts.”
Mr. Wlodyka warned homeowners not to be too disarmed by the cute appearance of a squirrel, which he described as “a tree rat with a pretty tail.” He also pointed out that, like other Island mammals, they can shed ticks that carry Lyme disease and other pathogens.
Unfortunately for Ms. Eagle, her big tomcats, Orion and Perseus, had accompanied her off-Island, or they would likely have dispatched the “cheeky little bugger” before it began sharpening its teeth on her house. Adding insult to injury, Ms. Eagle found out that her homeowner policy has a vermin exclusion.
“It’s official. Due to the classification of squirrels as vermin, the insurance company is in the clear,” she said.