How to Get Rid of Squirrels in Your Loft Space in St Neots

St Neots sits on the River Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, with Eynesbury forming its southern part across the river. We cover St Neots and Eynesbury from our Cambridge base, and the approach to a squirrel in the roof is the same whichever side of the river you are on.

This guide is about the decision in front of you once you are fairly sure it is a squirrel: what to try, what to leave alone, and what professional removal actually involves.

First, Do Less Than You Want To

The instinct is to go up with a torch and bang on the joists, or to find the hole and block it. Both feel like progress. Neither helps.

Banging and shouting may send a squirrel out for an afternoon. It comes back, often by a slightly different route, and it is now warier of anything new in the loft, including traps. Blocking the hole while a squirrel is inside is worse: it gnaws another way out, usually through a fascia, a soffit or the edge of the roof covering.

Why the Obvious DIY Options Fall Short

Live-catch traps from a garden centre

These are easy to buy and the plan is usually to drive the squirrel somewhere green and let it go. That is the problem. Releasing a trapped grey squirrel is an offence, so anyone who catches one alive is left needing to dispatch it humanely. If you would not be prepared to do that, do not set the trap.

Repellents and deterrents

Sprays, smells, lights and sonic gadgets can make a loft less pleasant for a while. A squirrel that has nested, stored food or raised young up there has strong reasons to stay, and a roof that let it in will let it back in the moment the deterrent fades.

Poison

Do not put rodent poison in a loft for squirrels. It is not the right tool, it risks other animals, and a squirrel that dies in the eaves leaves you with a smell and a job to reach it.

Check It Really Is a Squirrel

Daytime running, rolling sounds and heavy movement at first light point to squirrels. Scratching mainly at night points more to rats or mice; our guide to rats in the loft covers that case. Fluttering at dusk could mean bats, which are protected along with their roosts, and in spring the noise near the eaves may be nesting birds, whose active nests are protected too.

If you are unsure, stop and ask before anything is blocked or trapped. The closest static guide on this site for your area is the one for telling squirrel noise apart in Huntingdon, and the evidence it describes applies just as well in St Neots.

What Professional Removal Involves

We start outside, because the entry point is usually easier to read from the garden than from inside the loft: chewed edges at the eaves, a lifted tile, a gap where a lower roof meets the main wall, a branch or fence line giving a route up.

Then we set a trapping programme using legally compliant traps placed where the squirrels are travelling, set so cats and birds cannot get in, and checked at least daily. What is caught is humanely dispatched, because the law does not allow anything else. How that programme runs is set out in our squirrel trapping guide.

Timing matters. If there could be young in the loft, that affects what is done and when, and we will talk it through with you rather than rush it.

The squirrel is the visible problem. The hole in the roof is the one you pay for twice if it is left.

Closing the Roof Afterwards

Once the loft is clear, the way in has to be closed with something a squirrel cannot chew back through, and anything that gives it a route to the roof needs cutting back well clear of the building. Our squirrel proofing guide covers the materials, the usual weak spots and who should do the work.

Cost and Booking in St Neots

There is no separate St Neots page on this site; the squirrel control service covers the whole area. Squirrel trapping is £280 fixed cost, the same in St Neots as in Cambridge, with no call-out fee and the price confirmed before anything is booked.

Every treatment is guaranteed on the same terms: if the problem comes back within 14 days of treatment, we return and re-treat free of charge. The squirrel trapping cost guide explains why the work is priced as a programme of visits. Call 01223 902388 and tell us what you are hearing and when.