December 12–19, 1996

city beat

Nuts About Squirrels

The furry little critters are kicking up quite a ruckus in East Falls.

By Daisy Fried

Have you been hearing the squirrel horror stories too?

"A squirrel got into the roof, then through a vent into my closet," says Laura Bonetzky, a City Paper account manager who lives in an East Falls condo. "My shelves and clothes and everything were knocked down. My fiance called me at work to say he'd found turds all over, but they weren't from my animals. We finally caught it in a pet carrier, but first it chewed the carpet, my new windows, my leftover pies and breads from Thanksgiving, some candles. It lost a tooth and bled all over my high school graduation gown, messed up my jackets and sweaters. It was trying to build a nest in my closet."

The common grey squirrel — several million of which live in Pennsylvania alone — is, scientifically, sciurus carolinensis. Sciurus is Greek for "shadow tail": or "shade of tail" which alludes to the squirrel's habit of sitting in the shade of its tail.

It's a hardy animal which has two litters a year, in the spring and summer, averaging two to four pups per litter. The summer litter stays with the mother through the winter. Squirrels don't hibernate, but bury nuts which they locate by keen smell and good memory and consume through the winter. They carry fleas, lice , mites, chiggers, ticks, worms and protozoan parasites. They inhabit forests dominated by seed producing trees (they eat the seeds) but also do fine in urban parks and, too often, human habitations.

"It's basically a cavity dweller," says Rich Lupinsky, wildlife conservation officer for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. "It likes to make nests in old dead trees. If it sees a hole in a house, it figures it's just a nicely painted tree."

Peggy Finnegan of Amendt Pest Control, Co. in Southwest Philly says she doesn't think there's necessarily an increase in the squirrel population. But she says this is the time of year when the most squirrel complaints come in.

"Some of them have litters and they want to get out of the cold," says Finnegan. "If you've got siding on your house and a piece comes down, they'll get in that way. Or through the drain spout. They're known for going onto the top of the roof. If a roofer leaves a hole or doesn't close it down tight enough it'll be in. We had one recently who fell in the chimney. This time of year we've got five jobs a week."

Bonetzky's neighbor Margaret White is no stranger to sciurus.

"Oh yeah, a squirrel got into my unit," says White. "I have a dropped ceiling in the kitchen; it was running around up there. It broke three panels. For a whole week I had to hear it running up and down the walls. It got under the kitchen sink and jumped out at me when I opened the cabinet door. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It chewed up all my Tupperware, but the worst thing was a friend of mine made me a beautiful gingerbread house which it destroyed and it got into a bowl of nuts. Nothing really valuable, but what a mess. It seems to me there's an awful lot of them this year. Another woman in the next doorway to ours, she had it in there. She was terrorized. She moved out to stay with her daughter till they got rid of it, but she couldn't take it, she moved out."

"Oh God, don't mention the word squirrel," says Jim Horwitz, the property manager for East Falls' Gypsy Lane Condos. "Once they get in they can do an awful lot of damage in their effort to get out. I mean if they put you in a bag wouldn't you fight like hell to get out? They're really noisy. I don't think we're any worse than any other area. I can't say if they're worse than ever. We called somebody who came in with a net and caught the animals in a humane way. Basically we would not have permitted them to be caught if it wasn't done in a humane way."

Amendt charges $125 for an initial visit from its squirrel control man. He sets a trap, and takes the beast "to the furthest park from the customers," says Finnegan. "So they don't come back again, which they sometimes know how to do."

Second visits from Amendt cost up to $65 per animal, depending on how involved the squirrel pursuit is.

"We advise the owner to close up the hole," says Finnegan. "Sometimes they're hard to find. My sister in law heard a noise and a scurrying under her bedroom floor and followed the noise from one end of the house to the other. She went out to the yard and looked up and saw that a screen into the building wasn't there anymore: it chewed its way in. No, we don't kill them. We're not allowed to."

Technically, Lupinsky says, all mammals are protected in this state. But if there's a health issue, you have to destroy the animal.

A few years ago some rabid raccoons that should have been destroyed were released into another area of the state. "Basically we were inadvertently spreading the disease," Lupinsky says, and adds that three rabid squirrels showed up in Bucks County in the past year. "But usually rabies is associated with omnivorous or carnivorous mammals, who contract rabies when they eat a rabid animal."

Of much more concern is destruction of property. Finnegan cites a house that burned down after a squirrel chewed the wires. Lupinsky concurs. "They chew wires, they chew up insulation. They're rodents and like all rodents their teeth grow. It's their nature to continuously chew to wear their teeth down. Too often squirrels are a self-inflicted problem. The trick is not to get them in. Avoid feeding them. Watch your bird feeders. Block up holes under the eves, ventilators. Put down moth balls — that discourages them."

Finnegan says it used to be squirrels mostly got into houses with trees up against them. "But what I think is happening is because everybody's getting cable, there are more and more wires up, and that seems to be how they get up high. My sister-in-law, for example, doesn't have any trees around her house. But it can get into more high places by going on cable wires."

The hole in Bonetzky's building is being sealed. Bonetzky's squirrel did $4,000 worth of damage. "But my insurance company's not going to cover it," she sighs. "I guess wild animals are considered an Act of God."