Fleas With No Pet in the House

The previous occupant

The first thing to establish is how long you have been there and whether the last household had an animal.

Flea cocoons sit dormant for a long time when there is nothing warm-blooded moving about, and an empty property between occupants is exactly that condition. The trigger for emergence is vibration, warmth and the carbon dioxide of something breathing — in other words, you moving in.

That is why a family with no pet can move into a house and be bitten within days. The fleas were already there, waiting, and the new arrivals set them off. It is also why this happens so often at a changeover, which is its own job with its own section: end of tenancy flea fumigation.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Something living in the building

If you have been there a while and this is new, something may have moved in.

• A bird's nest in a soffit, an eave or a roof space. This is the classic cause of upstairs bites in a house with no pet. Bird fleas are a different species from the cat flea, and they will bite people — typically in a short sharp burst once the chicks have fledged and the nest is abandoned, and the fleas come looking for something else to feed on. If the bites started a few weeks after there were birds in the eaves, that is almost certainly it.
• A cat living in a loft, under a floor or in a crawl space, usually getting in through a broken airbrick or a gap at a vent. This one carries the ordinary cat flea, so it behaves like a pet problem in a house with no pet.
• Squirrels, occasionally, though the squirrel's own flea is fussy about its host and rarely establishes in a house. Where there are squirrels in a loft the fleas are usually the least of it.

In every one of these the fleas are the symptom. Dealing with them without dealing with the animal is a repeat visit, and we will say so.

The garden

Foxes are the one that matters. They lie up under sheds and decking, they carry the same fleas that live on cats and dogs, and they leave eggs in the dry sheltered ground they have been resting on, where the larvae develop perfectly well. Hedgehogs and rabbits have fleas of their own, but those are fussy about their host and do not set up in houses, so they are rarely the answer.

People carry the adults indoors on trousers and shoes, and it is particularly common in gardens backing onto fields, woodland or open ground. If the bites happen after time in the garden and there is nothing in the house, look under the shed.

Visitors, and other people’s cats

A visiting dog leaves eggs on the carpet in an afternoon. A neighbour's cat that has found an old cat flap, or that sleeps on a conservatory chair while you are out, does it repeatedly.

The cat flap left by a previous occupant is a recurring find and one of the cheapest things to fix in the whole of pest control. If fleas keep coming back to a house with no pet, that is worth checking before anything else.

When you ring, tell us what the garden backs onto, whether anything has been heard in the loft, how long you have lived there, and whether there is a cat flap. Those four answers usually find it.

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