Rat Control
Rats have followed humans around since essentially the dawn of recorded history. By nature, rats are scavengers, meaning they find their resources by picking up what others leave behind. Much the same way vultures feed on dead animals, rats feed on a wide variety of different things they can typically recover from trash. While they have been known to raid a garden, pantry, or closet on occasion, they are notorious for filth thanks to their frequently being spotted in refuse containers. If a rat has entered your home, there’s a strong chance they found their way in thanks to their nose picking up a whiff of trash or rotting food.
Rats generally try to avoid being seen, and will often times move where they are under cover, including between walls, in the ceiling over your head, and even through your attic. In fact, attics are how many rats find their way into homes—they are excellent climbers, and will scale trees and jump onto rooftops if they think they can find an opening to get into a home where they can smell food. Rats have been known to cause damage to homes, including causing foul odors and mold growth with their urine and fecal droppings. Rats will also sometimes chew on electrical and communication wires, causing damage that is difficult and expensive to repair.
Mice Control
Mice and rats exhibit a lot of the same behaviors, and the methods for controlling them are not all that unalike either. However, whereas rats tend to be more solitary creatures and are often found alone, mice are typically more social and usually find resources in larger groups. It isn’t uncommon for a rat problem to often be three, four, or even more mice than that.
Mice also have an uncanny ability to slip through gaps and cracks that you may never have thought they were capable of fitting in. This makes it particularly hard to seal homes and fully protect them from invading mice, particularly if a small gap or entrance is located in an area of dense vegetation or cover. Once inside, mice move quickly through walls to not only find a place where they can hide and set up a nest, but where they can easily locate food as well.
Voles
Also known as “meadow mice,” voles are often mistaken for mice because of their remarkably similar appearance. However, there is one huge difference between the two: voles burrow into soil, building networks of tunnels that can destroy a yard in a short amount of time. You can generally tell if you have a vole problem if your lawn has one to two inch wide tunnels in the surface that you can both see and feel underfoot. Eventually, areas that have been heavily tunneled by voles will completely die out, leaving your lawn looking weak, patchy, and barren. Dealing with voles is a bit more difficult than rats and mice as well, so it is important to trust your problem to an experienced rodent control team.
Whether you’re dealing with rats, mice, or voles, contact Ridd Pest Control and let us take care of the issue for you!
