Squirrel in a chimney….for a year!
Sunday, October 19th, 2008 
It’s been way too long since my last entry. Since mid-september the calls for squirrels have been coming in steadily as the first blast of cold weather sends them looking for a warm place to reside for the winter. One call in particular turned out to be VERY interesting. A man called last week and told me that he had a squirrel in his fireplace that he’d like to have removed. Nothing unordinary about that, it happens all the time. However when I asked him how long the squirrel had been in his fireplace he responded “since last November”.
This is where it gets interesting. About this time last year this squirrel fell down their chimney, past the damper and ended up behind the glass doors inside their fireplace. After seeing it scratching on the glass doors they thought that it must be hungry so they got it some peanuts and even a bowl of water. The squirrel then disappeared back up into the chimney. The following night the squirrel appeared in the fireplace and began scratching on the glass doors again. So once again the homeowner gave the squirrel some more peanuts and filled it’s water bowl. This cycle went on and on over the last year. Each day the squirrel would scratch on the glass doors and the homeowner would feed it. During this time they weren’t quite sure if the squirrel was leaving the chimney or not but they kept feeding it and even enjoyed seeing it appear every night. Finally they decided that they were going to use their fireplace this year and that the squirrel would have to be evicted so they called us.
Mike went out and inspected the situation. He found that the inside of the chimney in which the squirrel was residing had a ceramic liner (which makes it impossible for a squirrel to climb) and it was also full of cobwebs. He concluded that there was absolutly no way that the squirrel was leaving the chimney and that it had indeed been living inside this chimney/fireplace for almost a year. There was also a pile of peanut shells inside the fireplace that was about 5 inches high from all the peanuts that the squirrel had eaten over the last year. I don’t have a picture of any of this because Mike is a dufus and never thinks to take out his camera that I spent $500 on and he never, ever uses.
He ended up trapping the squirrel and releasing it in the yard. The poor squirrel is probably in terrible shape after a year of very little physical activity. It now has to get back to foraging for it’s own food and acting more like a wild squirrel.
One more strange story for the “now i’ve seen it all” pile.
Matt Grady