Another "Spring" Cleaning...

Those who have been long time readers of the blog may remember my other "Spring" cleaning incident, which you can read about here and here. Well, today we had another one...

This morning Brynlee came running into our room, freaking out that there was a mouse scratching at the storage room door. My first thought is...well, I don't think it would be scratching at the door since there is a big enough space under the door for it to get out. It is probably in the walls.

About a half an hour later she comes upstairs again saying she heard the scratching noise again. Rob got a mouse trap and set it in the storage room. He said when he first opened the door, he saw something so it kinda confirmed that, yes, there was a mouse in there...or so we thought...

He checked the trap a little while later and it had gone off but no little mousie was in it. I was in the downstairs bathroom and could hear little scratching and pitter patter scampering around in the ceiling...yeah, so not cool! The strange thing is that it sounded alot bigger than a mouse! I heard it go from the bathroom down the hall (again all of this in the ceiling of the basement) and back into the storage room. I called for Rob to come check it out. He peeked in the storage room and said, um, that's no mouse. That's a squirrel!

I called Animal Control, not really knowing if it was something they'd even deal with. By this point, the squirrel was scratching and gnawing at the carpet under the door, trying to get out. We put up a board so it couldn't escape and then a police officer arrived. He said that Animal Control was out for the week at a training conference and different police officers were covering for them. This one happened to normally work at the jail in Brigham City. He said, "I'll admit I never do this kind of stuff so I'll need your help." He brought in a box trap, slowly opened the door with the trap in the doorway...nothing. It had been about 5 minutes and we hadn't heard it so I wondered if it had found it's way into another part of the house.

Rob went in the storage room (which is also where the furnace is) to see if he could tell how the squirrel got in and noticed a ventilation pipe that goes straight up to the roof. The end cap had been knocked part way off. Our guess is that the squirrel must have fallen down the pipe from the roof and knocked the cap off and fell into the room. Here's a view up the vent, looking out through the roof and the end cap that had been knocked off...
Rob and the officer started taking stuff out of the room to see if it was hiding amongst all the boxes. The family room was beginning to fill up with all the stuff from the room and I thought for sure it wasn't still in there. Just last week I was in the storage room and thought to myself that I really need to organize all the stuff since alot of the seasonal stuff has just been piling up in the middle of the room instead of being put away in boxes on the shelves.

Almost everything was out and then the officer moved a big Christmas Rubbermaid tote and the squirrel jumped out of its hiding spot. The officer jumped back and I was laughing hysterically! Especially because he had just said that he keeps picturing the "When Animals Attack" show, thinking the squirrel is going to come flying out and latch onto him! Then he pulls out his flashlight, points it in the corner where parts of an extra bed are and says "I have a visual" in the most serious voice. I couldn't tell if he was really being serious (because of his training) or what but I had to control myself from not busting out laughing. Soon after jabs and swats with the broom and cornering the poor thing, it went into the trap.

A call went into dispatch....I have one squirrel in custody.