What To Note About Rodents In The Winter

To get through the cold weather of winter, rodents need a place that is warm and cool for their survival. From their perspective, getting into your home is not about disturbing you, it is a game of making sure they see another day. But with this comes a lot of inconvenience for homeowners. You will find your previously neat home is now full of rodent droppings and any other disgusting thing that comes with rodent infestations.

Below you will find a deep look into the habits of rodents especially when it is very cold. What do they do to get food and what do they do to keep warm? Read on to find out more.

What will make rodents increase in a home?

It is easy to assume that the cold of winter may keep rodent numbers controlled. After all, rats, like numerous other rodents, go into hibernation, right? No, they don’t rest amid the winter months and in unforgiving conditions. While the majority of the wild creatures largely don’t thrive in cold weather, the brown rodent may be a tough species. They are survival machines and even in winter they still thrive.

Unfortunately, mice do not hibernate in the winter (but wouldn’t it be great if they did?). Any homeowner who’s dealt with a pest infestation knows that rodents tend to appear around this snowy season. Why? Because it’s cold outside, and they want to get inside your house to warm up and find food. Most pest problems crop up in the summer, but rodents are unique; once they’re inside your home, they are active during the winter, and they reproduce quickly.

Mice can fit inside spaces as small as the eraser of a pencil. They look for cracks in your foundation or external pipes and infiltrate through them. Once they’re in, it’s challenging to get them out. They are typically most active at night and only travel a small, safe radius. They like to hoard food, set up a den, and sit tight. Read more from GL Pest Control…

Stockpiling

Rats are very wise creatures knowing to stock up food for the cold season. Of course, this stock is not so pretty, with food ranging from stolen cereals to anything from the garbage. The stocked-up food is necessary as it is next to impossible to get food when it’s all winter. If rats get into your home, the danger is they can contaminate your food as they look for something to eat.

Rats aren’t able to fatten themselves up for the winter like other animals, but they can prepare themselves for winter in other ways. Starting in autumn or even late summer, rats and mice start getting more aggressive in the pursuit of food. Instead of eating opportunistically, they start seeking extra food.

Rats can and will eat virtually anything, including garbage, so they always have options. Generally, rats will drag their findings back to an area they can access easily and leave it there for later. They maintain their stockpiles throughout the winter, often incorporating them into their children’s nests.

A few rat favorites include garden or bird seed, pet food, paper, nuts, compost waste, and fabric. We’ve solved many infestations simply by moving bird feeders farther away from a structure. It might also be a good idea just to take the bird feeder down come fall. Read more from Plunketts…

Nesting

Once rats have chosen a building in which to protect from the cold and have stockpiled nourishment, they then focus on building a home for themselves. Rodent homes are not the best-looking. Instead of carefully weaving together twigs they are unpleasant heaps of destroyed materials that rodents pick from anywhere.

They utilize different types of nests to be comfortable in the winter and not freeze to death.

House mice as their name implies look to shelter in man made structures. Inside they still look for smaller nests so they can stay warm.

Deer mice are known to utilize abandoned squirrel and bird nests and like house mice they nest in buildings as well.

The other reason that mice don’t hibernate is that they have found away to conserve energy. They use their nesting sites to store food. If you find a mouse nest you might find that they have decent sized caches of grain.

As explained earlier, mice are social animals. As social animals they do huddle together in colder temperatures to stay warm. Mice nests usually have more than one inhabitant and that way they keep each other warm. Read more from Kapture Pest…

What you will observe about rats, is that for them it’s not about the materials the nest is made from. For rats, they want warm, dull places that are secure from predators. And what better space than man-made buildings?

This winter, do not let rodents be a bother to you and your family. With the patterns above you can know where to keep watch and how to deal with them. Go ahead and contact Backyard Bug Patrol to exterminate the rats totally at extremely affordable prices. Call us today!