Gray squirrel breeding season
Gray squirrels are one of the few animals that can go through two breeding cycles in one calendar year. As with most animals, they first breed in late winter and early spring, and young are born mid to late spring. When in your attic, soffit, or anywhere else in your home, this can be a very noisy time. You’ll hear running around, chewing, scratching, and vocalizations both from the adults and the young as they get older and siblings start to bicker. But the unique thing with these gray squirrels (red squirrels often do this as well, but were using the more common gray squirrels as the example here) is the ability to have two litters of young per year, with the second breeding cycle starting in mid summer and young being born late summer - typically early august. This only happens when food is readily abundant, they will not breed this second time if food is not plentiful.
We mention the second breeding cycle a lot when talking with clients because not many people know this, and when dealing with the eviction and exclusion of these animals, you have to know when there is a chance of young being present. The process to remediate a squirrel issue in your home usually involves some sort of trapping of one-way door, but if there are young inside that are too young to be vocal or make their presence known, you can risk missing them and then you deal with squirrels dying inside from starvation (inhumane), or a mother squirrel willing to chew its way back into the structure with the force which can only be described as “mom strength”. That can become a very noise and damaging situation. That’s why were the professionals though, we know that these animals often breed a second time in the year and address the situation properly.
When addressing jobs where this may be the case, we need to use clues to identify if there are young present. Sometimes we can simply look around and see if there are young in a nest, but the nest location isn’t always easily accessible. Tools such as thermal cameras that can read heat behind drywall can tell us this, or sometimes we just have to start trapping and if the first squirrel caught is an adult female with nipples exposed showing that she’s been nursing, we adjust our next moves to make sure it is done properly. Not every job for squirrels comes with young (called kits), so we need to identify this quickly and complete the work in the proper manner.
If this sounds like something that you may be dealing with, don’t hesitate to call us or reach out by our online submission form to learn more about the process, get a quote, or get to work. We perform humane squirrel removal and exclusion all over western Mass including (but not limited to) Westfield, Southwick, Agawam, West Springfield, Holyoke, Easthampton, Southampton, Longmeadow, East Longmeadow, and others.