There’s something living in the wall behind my bed. Something nocturnal. Something that, judging by the dry rustling sounds I sometimes hear, is building a nest in preparation to drop a batch of babies. In the wall behind my bed.
Awww, the miracle of life.
I’ve heard evidence of small creatures visiting this same wall space off and on in the past, but never with the persistence or loudness of recent nights. To be honest, I’m not even sure our current visitor is all that small. Eric was out of town on Sunday night, helping his parents with a renovation project, but I kept waking up with the heart-pounding impression that someone was walking around on the hardwood floors. Each time, a few seconds of breathless listening confirmed that the sound (scratch-thump-scuttle) was emanating from inside the wall, so at least I wasn’t in immediate danger of being stabbed or strangled. A couple of times, I heard some surprisingly powerful squeaks. And on the following night, when the sounds started up before I fell asleep, I clearly heard a bump that could have been made by a human elbow. When I told Eric about the size of that bump, he joked that maybe there was an opossum in the wall. Except he wasn’t really joking. And when I wondered aloud if it could be a rat, Eric said entirely straight-faced that it just might be. I know he’s right; in fact, I’d say the forty-year-old pizza joint and affiliated dumpsters on the opposite side of our back alley make this a leading possibility.
I’m not generally rodent-phobic, and I even kept a pet rat for a few years in college. (His name was Justin. Name that literary reference.) So the thought of a mouse scurrying around in the walls doesn’t really faze me; in fact, it strikes me as normal and basically benign. But for some reason the idea of a greasy city rat lurking on the other side of a layer of drywall makes my lips curl involuntarily in disgust. And don’t even get me started on opossums. Marsupials in Minnesota? And they have sharp fangs? Shut up.
Regardless of how I feel personally about the species, an animal in the walls is never great news for a house. Things get peed on. Insulation and wires get chewed. (One pest control firm’s website claims that squirrel-chewed wiring is responsible for 95% of house fires, but I suspect that’s a grossly inflated statistic designed to sell their squirrel-removal services to panicked homeowners.) So, normal or not, genuine fire hazard or not, we should probably mention our nocturnal visitor to the landlord. I’m not sure what, if anything, he’ll choose to do about it. Eric’s pretty smart about pest control, and his best idea is to locate the opening that’s letting the critter in and install a one-way door over it so the marauder can get out but not back in again. We could also set a trap at the opening, but either way, as Eric pointed out, you run the risk of exiling or trapping a parent while helpless babies are left behind in the wall. The part of me that’s not at all curious what a whole litter of dead baby rats smells like is totally content with inaction on this issue. The rest of me thinks inaction might be irresponsible. Ultimately, I’m happy to leave this one up to the landlord. After all, we probably won’t be renters much longer. Might as well eat it up while we still can.
The post Mice and Rats and ‘Possums, Oh My! appeared first on How to Get Rid of Things™.
No comments:
Post a Comment