How Are Grey Squirrels Removed From Loft Spaces in Great Shelford?

A one-way exclusion device is fitted over the entry point and lets an animal out but not back in. It is a real technique, it is used properly in some situations, and it is worth being honest about when it does not apply.

Where It Can Work

• A single animal, using one clearly identified entry point
• Outside the breeding periods, so there is no possibility of dependent young
• Where the whole roofline can be proofed at the same time, so the excluded animal has nowhere else to get back in
• Where the device can be fitted properly, securely, at the actual opening
• Where it can be monitored, because a device that has been gnawed around or pushed aside is worse than nothing

Where It Fails

1. Young in the roof. This is the serious one. BPCA's guidance is two litters a year, in early spring and summer. Excluding an adult while dependent young are inside leaves them shut in with no parent, which is inhumane and produces an odour problem in a void nobody can reach. For a good part of the year this is a real possibility rather than a theoretical one.
2. More than one entry point. Exclude at one and the animal uses another, and you have achieved nothing except a false sense that the job is done.
3. More than one animal, where some are excluded and some are not.
4. An animal determined to get back in. A squirrel that has been excluded from a nest site will work at the roofline to return, and it is capable of making a new opening.
5. Where the roofline cannot all be closed at once, on a large or complex roof.

Why It Is Not Simply the Humane Option

It is worth saying plainly. An exclusion device applied at the wrong time of year is not the kind choice — it is the one that leaves young to die in an inaccessible void. The humane version of this technique depends entirely on the survey that precedes it, which is the same survey that any other approach needs.

And the Legal Point That Sits Alongside It

Exclusion avoids the question of what happens to a caught animal, which is why people ask about it. It is worth knowing the position anyway: BPCA are clear that it is against the law to re-release a grey squirrel caught alive, and that anyone who catches one alive is legally obliged to humanely dispatch it. That is why a live-catch trap bought with the intention of releasing the animal is not the humane shortcut it appears to be.

What We Will Do

Assess the situation and tell you which approach genuinely fits it, including when exclusion is the right answer. What we will not do is fit an exclusion device in spring without establishing what is behind the opening first.