Who Let the Squirrels Out?

I used to think that squirrels were so cute and innocent, until . . . 

When we first moved into our house, one of the first things I noticed that I didn't like, was this very large, over grown, bush/tree combo in the front yard.  It actually had leaves on it in this picture, but 75% of the year, there were no leaves or flowers, just ugly dead looking branches.  And underneath it was a hodge-podge of overgrown, just as ugly, bushes.

Last Fall, Ken trimmed part of it, to see if just trimming it would help (it's hard to see in the picture below), but trimming it did NOT help.  It was still ugly.  The clump of dead-looking branches is actually a very overgrown honeysuckle vine that had grown out of control.

So, in order to appease me AND to give our house better curb-side appeal, Ken agreed to cut down all of the honeysuckle vine, and ended up also ripping up the bushes underneath the honeysuckle vine, which had grown out sideways due to a lack of sunshine, etc.  Leaving just the oak trees with nice, clean dirt around it, and a bit of myrtle, the area looks SO much better.

But here's the problem.  Squirrels lived in that clump of mess in our front yard.  And when we cut it down this March, the squirrels moved in . . . to our house!  I had no idea squirrels were nocturnal until we heard them running over our heads and over the girl's bedrooms all night AND all day.  When do squirrels sleep?  I certainly wasn't getting any sleep, and the girls would get scared from the noise and end up in our bed, which resulted in, yep, you guessed it, no sleep.  During the day when we'd hear the squirrels, the girls and I would pound on the walls to try to scare the squirrels.  Yet despite our pounding and the girls screaming, the squirrels were not scared away.

Ken started researching methods to get rid of squirrels.  But then just as suddenly as the noise from the squirrels started it, it suddenly stopped . . . and before we'd even had a chance to try out any of our squirrel-be-gone methods.  A few weeks later when Ken finally had a chance to get up into our attic, he found a few things - one of which was a very dead squirrel.  He also found that squirrels had chewed through quite a few of our air vent caps on our roof, which is how we suspect they got in, but which aren't exactly easy to get back out of, hence, the dead squirrel.

Today we hired a roofing company to fix a small leak we had in our roof and asked them to also replace the plastic, chewed through, air vent caps, with new steel, squirrel-proof, air vent caps.  The contractor replaced all 10 air vent caps and told me that some of the old ones were so chewed through, there were gaping holes in our roof.  We're lucky we haven't had a wet spring!  He also told me that he saw a squirrel run out of the attic while working on the roof.  Hopefully there aren't anymore up there, because now they really won't be able to get out.  And hopefully the new metal caps will keep them out and they won't find anything else they can chew through.