mercyskye dot com

Squirrels, Take Note

Posted on Mon Feb 18, 08:15 PM in Playing House

This morning, as I was quietly preparing a crock-pot pork roast, listening to public radio and watching the snow fall gently, I heard that unmistakable sound that can only be wild animals caught in manmade situations. In this case, it turned out to be a squirrel in the flue duct of our water heater.

What the f—-, squirrels? Are you guys that dumb, or hard up for warm places, that you would crawl down a chimney (that probably smells of carbon monoxide) with no end in sight, find the smallest damn pipe leading to the Toasty Place, get yourself stuck so that you can’t turn your self around, scrabble around and growl, only to die when the water heater cycles on and blasts you in the face with a poisonous fume?

I have serious issues with wild animals in my living space. Back in Madison, our last apartment had a completely weird problem with birds getting in the basement, and subsequently flapping their way around in the shared hallway, and once—memorably—into our apartment; this same place also ended up having a mouse problem our last year there (I blame construction in a field across the street), which was luckily contained within a few walls and the attic. In either case, I get jittery and nervous in these situations and become obsessed with figuring out the eradication of said pests.

I haven’t had to deal with this in about 6 years, so to hear this scrabbling in the basement was doubly intense because it was right underneath me, and we don’t have a barrier between our basement and the upstairs. I dread the thought of chasing wild animals through our house.

After realizing the sound was coming somewhere within a pipe (no free-range wild animals in our basement), and then figuring out that it was in the exhaust flue between our water heater and the chimney, I was stumped. It was clearly not going anywhere, no matter the sounds I made or it made or the way I banged on the pipe with the handle of a mop (my thought was that it was small, and it might turn around and back up the chimney). My next thought was twofold—chase it up by cycling on the water heater, and call the authorities to remove a live animal.

My conversation with the local non-emergency police dispatch resulted in the transfer of the call to the fire department. I really didn’t think we needed the fire department, especially when they said that yes, there would be a truck sent (but, thankfully, there would be no lights or sirens), but apparently “they have equipment to deal with this.” So not but 10 minutes later, a truck comes with two firemen and one other official (not police). I show them to the basement. I note to myself that there is a very faint smell of… singe.

I honestly didn’t know if I needed public authorities or not for dealing with wildlife. I thought they would cage it, or contain it somehow (“equipment,” it turns out, that the fire department does NOT have). But they were happy to help and set about to assessing the situation, gathering a nearby trashcan, and wresting the pipe from the chimney (hey, it turns out that if virtually no maintenance has been done on the pipe connection in over 50 years, you can lift it right out! neat!). I was standing a respectful distance from the action, expecting at any moment an angry animal to leap out and scamper wildly throughout the house. One of the firemen said, as things emptied into the trashcan, “Yeah, there is a lot of lint and stuff… I think he ran back up,” but the other, who was holding the pipe, said, “No, he’s in there.” “He’s in there?” “Yeah, he’s dead. Let’s go outside and have a look.”

So up we went to the driveway with the pipe and the trashcan, and I let the two firemen look in. They agreed, he was dead. One of them pulled him up by the tail, and there, for the three of us to behold, was a very deceased, pipe-shaped squirrel, clearly having been too big to turn around in the pipe. I had gassed him.

The three men were nice enough to school me on the way to reconnect the flue to the chimney and what kind of product to buy to do it correctly. Later, I found out that purchasing a chimney cap is inexpensive, and installing one requires no special tools or even any drilling. So, I have a couple spring projects, thanks to this little Darwin award recipient.