Rats or squirrels in the attic?

Go by the clock. Squirrels are active in daylight and quiet at night. Roof rats are the reverse, loudest in the hour after dark and again before dawn. Droppings differ too: rat droppings are dark, about half an inch long and pointed at the ends, while squirrel droppings are shorter with rounded ends.

Can I just use bait in the attic?

We would avoid it. A rat that takes bait dies wherever it happens to be, which is often inside a wall cavity you cannot open, and you then live with the smell for a couple of weeks. Trapping puts the animal somewhere it can be removed. Exterior bait stations have a place on some properties as part of a wider plan.

Are they a health risk?

They contaminate what they walk across, and attic insulation soaked with urine and droppings is worth removing rather than living with. Droppings should be dampened before cleanup instead of swept dry, and gloves and a mask are sensible. Chewed wiring is the other real risk, and it is a common finding in long running attic infestations.

Roof Rats in Tampa Attics: Signs and Entry

Roof rats are the rats in Tampa attics. They are slim, dark, with a tail longer than the body, and they climb rather than burrow. Scratching over a ceiling after dark is the usual first sign. They get in through gaps the size of a quarter at soffit returns, gable vents, tile roof edges and split plumbing boots. Trapping clears them. Sealing keeps them out.

How to identify it

The roof rat, also called the black rat or fruit rat, is slim and agile, six to eight inches in the body with a scaly tail that is longer than the body. Fur is gray brown to nearly black, the ears are large and nearly hairless, and the snout is pointed. The Norway rat is heavier, brown and blunt nosed, with a shorter tail, and it stays at ground level.

You hear them before you see them: running across a ceiling after dark, sometimes a thump as one drops onto a truss. Other signs are droppings along attic joists and on ductwork, gnawed pantry boxes, shredded insulation used as nesting, and dark greasy smear marks along the line they run every night.

Where they show up and why

Attics, soffits, wall voids above a ceiling, garage rafters and occasionally under a raised floor on the older pier built houses.

They get up there by climbing. Oak and palm limbs over the roof, fence tops, trellises, vines and cable drops all work. Once on the roof, the openings are predictable: the corner where a soffit returns into a wall, a warped fascia seam, a gable vent with a torn screen, the void under the first course of barrel tile, a split plumbing vent boot and the top corners of a garage door.

What works, and what does not

Trap first, with snap traps set on the runways in the attic and checked over a week or two. Seal once the trap count reaches zero, so nothing is closed in.

Sealing needs metal: galvanized hardware cloth screwed over an opening, sheet metal behind a fascia, vent guards on roof vents. Vents still have to breathe, so they get screened from behind rather than blocked.

Then cut the routes: limbs trimmed six to eight feet back from the roof, vines off walls, windfall fruit picked up daily in season.

Ultrasonic repellers do nothing measurable. Foam on its own gets chewed straight through. And trapping alone, with no sealing, means the next rat uses the same hole.