Rodent removal
Safe and Efficient Rodent Removal
Roof rats go up, Norway rats go under, and three kinds of mouse live on what the kitchen leaves out. Scratching, droppings and tail prints each tell you which.
Chapter 01
The three signs, and what each one tells you
AB Pest Control lists three signs on its own rodent page: scratching sounds, droppings, and dirt marks or tail prints. Each one points somewhere different. Scratching high up near the ceiling, usually after dark, reads differently from scratching low along a wall base, and both are different again from a scuffing sound that only starts right at dusk and stops by morning.
Droppings tell you how long something has been in the house and roughly how many are in there. Dirt marks or tail prints tell you the route, the path between the gap the animal came in through and whatever it is after in the kitchen. Read together, the three signs are less a checklist than a set of directions.
A stucco wall along a Kenmore foundation line, with bait stations set along the base where rats and mice cross
Roof rats go up, Norway rats go under
Six rodents show up on this service, which is too many to treat as one problem. Roof rats climb. They come in high, along a roofline, a soffit gap or a tree limb touching the house, and they nest in the attic or a wall void near the top of the structure. Norway rats and brown rats do the opposite: they burrow, working the foundation line and the crawlspace, and a Norway rat colony is often already established under the house before anyone hears the first scratch.
House mice, field mice and deer mice are the third group, and they follow the kitchen rather than the structure. Wherever food gets left out overnight, on a counter or in a pantry with a loose lid, is where any of the three shows up first, and a gap barely wider than a pencil at floor level is enough of an entry point.
Chapter 03
Why droppings are the part to leave alone
AB Pest Control's own framing on this service is a health one: Mice and rat droppings can carry harmful bacteria and diseases that can make your family sick. That is the reason to leave them where they are rather than sweep them up first and call after, and it is the same reason the removal itself is treated as part of the job rather than something a homeowner is expected to handle before the visit.
Thirty-plus years of doing this in Kenmore homes is what makes that call safe to make quickly, on sight, rather than something worked out after the fact.
Safe and efficient, in a house with a family in it
Safe and Efficient Rodent Removal is the headline on this service, and the safe half of it matters more in a house with children or pets in it than in an empty building. Roof rats climbing through an attic where kids sleep underneath, or a mouse route that crosses a kitchen floor a toddler plays on, both change how the job gets approached, not just where it happens.
Knowing which of the six rodents you actually have, before deciding what happens next, is most of what thirty years buys you in a house where getting it wrong is not an option.
AB Pest Control: Free phone estimates within 24 hours. Call (425) 205-1603.