The brilliant blog 0482

Anyone who has dealt with roof rats in San Diego learns the same lesson sooner or later: this is not a once-a-year chore. It is not something you handle for a weekend, forget for twelve months, and expect to stay fixed. In this part of Southern California, effective control is usually a mix of sanitation, structural exclusion, and population control. The part homeowners tend to underestimate is exclusion, the physical work of rodent proofing a house so rats cannot keep slip

Roof rats are a distinctly frustrating problem because they do not behave like the burrowing rats many people picture first. They climb. They move along fences, tree limbs, utility lines, and roof edges. They use overgrown landscaping and small building gaps as stepping stones, and once they find a workable route, they tend to keep using it. In San Diego, that matters because so many homes have the exact features roof rats like best: mature trees, attic vents, open eaves, t