A Squirrel Inside the Living Space

The first two minutes

Contain, Then Open One Exit

In order, and this is the whole of the immediate answer:

• Get people and pets out of that room and shut the door behind you. A cornered squirrel will bite and scratch, and a dog that engages with one comes off worse than people expect.
• Shut the internal doors so it cannot reach the rest of the house.
• Open one external window or door wide, as low and as large as possible, and close the curtains or blinds on the others so the open one is the obvious light.
• Leave the room and shut the door. Then wait somewhere else.

That last step is the one people find hardest and it is the one that works. A squirrel in an unfamiliar room with a person in it is panicking; a squirrel in an empty room with an open window usually leaves within the hour.

Check after twenty minutes or so, quietly. If it has gone, close the window before you celebrate.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

What not to do

Four Things

Do not chase it or try to catch it with a towel, a box or a broom. You will not win, the room will suffer, and a bite from a wild mammal means a trip to a doctor.

Do not corner it. An animal with no exit goes upward and outward, over furniture and curtains, and that is when things break and people get hurt.

Do not let the dog in. Ever, however confident you are about the dog.

Do not let it get behind an appliance if you can help it — the back of a fridge, a washing machine, a built-in oven. That is a warm dark gap with cable in it, which is precisely what it is looking for, and getting it out again becomes a much bigger job than opening a window.

If it will not leave

Or Is Hiding

Some do not go. A squirrel that has gone behind or under something, or up into a cupboard, may sit there for hours, and by then the room is quiet and you cannot be sure whether it has left.

Signs it is still in there: droppings, chewed anything, disturbed soil in a houseplant, and the obvious one — noise. Signs it has gone: nothing at all for a couple of hours with the window open.

If you are not sure, keep the room shut and the window open and ring. This is exactly the sort of thing same-day and emergency appointments exist for, including evenings and weekends, and there is no call-out fee for coming to look.

If somebody has been bitten or scratched, that is a doctor or 111 the same day, separately from anything to do with the animal.

How it got in

Three Routes, and Only One Is a Surprise

Down a chimney. The commonest by far, and if the fireplace is open at the bottom the animal arrives in the room directly. An uncapped pot is the cause and a cowl is the fix.

Through an open window or door. Particularly on a warm day, particularly with food visible, and particularly where a feeder is close to the house. Urban squirrels are bold about this and it is not a sign of anything unusual.

From the loft. This is the one that matters, because it means you have a second problem. A squirrel that has been living in your roof and has come through a loft hatch, a gap around a soil pipe or a hole it made in a ceiling has been in residence for a while — and where there is one route down there is usually insulation damage and quite possibly chewed cable above.

So the question to answer once the room is empty is not "how do I stop that happening again" but "was it in the loft first". The answer changes what needs doing considerably.

Afterwards

The Ten-Minute Check

Once it has gone and the window is closed:

• Look at the fireplace. If the flue is open and the pot is uncapped, that is almost certainly the route.
• Look at the ceiling in that room and the one above for a hole, staining or dropped debris.
• Listen in the morning. Daytime noise overhead means a loft problem rather than a one-off visitor.
• Check what got chewed in the room, including cable to lamps and televisions.
• Wash surfaces it was on, normally, with household cleaner. No special measures needed.

If the answer to the listening test is yes, the room was the symptom. The job is in the roof.

Short answers

Squirrel Questions

Going further

Squirrel Guides