The sound of scratching on the walls inside your home can be disconcerting and highly distracting. In the quiet hours of the evening, with Paloma asleep and Katie and I reading at our computers, we occasionally hear a scratch, scratch, scratch coming from a nearby wall. There’s an animal in there – but what? And how did it get there in the first place?
The situation has happened 3 or 4 times now since we have lived in the house inside an interior wall between our master bathroom and dining room. This summer, we had a pest exterminator come by our house to assess the situation in the last occurrance of the scratcing. He crawled all over our attic and in our crawlspace underneath the dining room floor, but he could find no evidence of rodents nor could he find any openings in the walls that would enable them to enter the wall. His suggestion: cut open the wall and inspect the situation. He suggested that we put up a temporary barrier to coax the rodent out of the house, instead of escaping to somewhere else inside the house.
As you can probably imagine, we weren’t too thrilled with the option of cutting open the wall, and especially worried about what could possibly be in there? A rat or mouse seemed like the only real possibility given the tight space, but what if it was a squirrel? or a bird? And in the past times where the noises came and went, where did the animal go? Did it die in the wall? Did it escape?
The scratches came again a few weeks ago. We decided this was it, we were going to open up the wall and fix the problem, once and for all. For your pleasure I have included the video chronicle of what we found.
Epilogue
As to whether or not our little friend was actually a rat or a mouse, I’m not exactly sure. I think it was a baby rat because of the disproportion beetween the head and the body, but looking back it is a bit too close to call.
How was the rat getting into the wall? We don’t know. I spent an hour fishing around the attic looking for the entry point. There are some very small cracks that I caulked up, but I don’t feel like I really know how entry was achieved. We did end up taking a picture into the bay, but there was no real clue offered by it.
So what happened with the other rats/mice in the past? We found multiple tails and sets of bones in the stud bay, but no other remains. We can also see that the previous owners have opened the wall in an adjacent bay, so this problem has been occurring for years in multiple locations. One disturbing theory on the where the rat remains went offered by Mr. Stadler: those remains were the bait to entice new rats to enter the death chamber. We just hope that by stopping the cycle it won’t happen again.
