Flying Squirrels Destroyed This Home

This one started with a phone call about a loud bang. A repeat customer of ours heard it, went outside, and the whole soffit was hanging off the side of his house. Not sagging. Down. When we got up there and looked at the rafter tails, the ends were chewed off. Flying squirrels had been living up in that soffit long enough to eat through the wood and the nails that were holding everything together.

If you have never seen what a rodent nest looks like inside a soffit, it is worse than you think. When that soffit dropped, the nest came with it. It ran the entire length of the run. Feces, chewed material, whatever else they dragged up there. That is not a small pest problem. That is years of animals living inside a part of your house you never look at.

Why Flying Squirrels End Up In Your Soffit

We have flying squirrels all over this area. People do not realize it because they are out at night and they are quiet compared to gray squirrels. They glide from a tree branch right onto the roof edge. That is the whole trip. They do not have to climb anything or work for it. If you have a limb hanging anywhere near your roofline, you have given them a landing pad.

Once they are on the roof edge, they only need one soft spot to get in. A gap where the soffit meets the fascia. A corner that was never sealed right. A vent with a screen that rotted out. Rot from a leaky gutter makes it even easier because now they are chewing wet, soft wood instead of solid lumber.

And soffits are perfect for them. It is dark, it is dry, it is protected from weather and from hawks and owls, and it is right next to warm air coming out of your attic. If you were a squirrel you would live there too.

They Do Not Just Nest, They Eat The Structure

This is the part homeowners miss. People hear scratching and think the animals are just up there making noise. Rodents have to chew. Their teeth keep growing, so they gnaw constantly to wear them down. That means the wood they are living in becomes the thing they chew on.

On this house they chewed the rafter tails. Those are the ends of your roof rafters that stick past the wall and carry the soffit and fascia. They also went right through the nails. Not around them. Through them.

So think about what is actually holding a soffit up. The rafter tails, the nailer against the wall, and the fasteners. Take enough material off all three and there is nothing left to hold it. It stays up until it does not, and then you get a bang and a pile of nest on the ground.

How You Know Before It Falls

You almost always get warning. People just do not know what they are hearing or looking at.

Noise at night. Flying squirrels are nocturnal. If you hear scratching, thumping, or a rolling sound above your bedroom ceiling after dark, that is not the house settling.

Staining or streaking below the soffit. Urine and feces work down through the wood and show on the outside.

Chew marks or holes at the corners. Look up at where the soffit meets the fascia and where it wraps a corner. That is where they get in.

Sagging. If one section of soffit is dipping lower than the rest, something behind it has lost material or fasteners.

Bugs. Nests bring flies, beetles, and mites. If you have a sudden bug problem in an upstairs room, look up.

Take a walk around your house with binoculars once a year. You do not need a ladder to spot most of this from the ground.

Why You Cannot Just Nail It Back Up

I get asked this a lot. The soffit fell, can you just put it back. Not honestly, no.

The soffit was attached to something. If the thing it was attached to is chewed down to nothing, you are nailing new material into damaged wood and it will fail again. On a job like this we cut back the rafter tails to solid wood and sister on new material, or we replace the tails outright depending on how far the damage goes.

Then we deal with what is inside. All the nest material comes out. If it got past the soffit into the attic, that needs to be addressed too, because insulation that has been used as a bathroom by rodents is not doing its job anymore and it is not something you want above your living space.

Then it goes back together with new nailer, new soffit, new fascia, and vents that are actually screened. Vented soffit is important. Your roof needs to breathe. But there is a difference between a vent that lets air move and a hole that lets animals in.

Keeping Them From Coming Back

Fixing the damage is half the job. If nothing changes, they come back, because as far as they are concerned that is their house.

Cut back branches that hang near the roof. If they can glide to it, they will. Six to ten feet of clearance makes a real difference.

Seal every gap, not just the one they used. Corners, where trim meets trim, around vents, and anywhere the fascia is not tight to the rafter tails.

Use metal where it counts. They chew wood and they chew soft plastic. Hardware cloth behind a vent opening stops them.

Fix the water problem. Clogged gutters and bad drip edge keep the fascia and soffit wet, and wet wood is easy to chew. A lot of rodent entry starts as a rot problem.

Do not seal them in. If animals are living up there right now and you close the last hole, they will chew a new one from the inside, usually into the attic, which is worse. Get them out first, then close it up.

What This Costs You If You Wait

The soffit is the cheap part. What runs the bill up is everything behind it. Rafter tails are structural. Once you are replacing those, you are into framing work, and if water has been getting in behind the fascia while the animals were up there, you can be into sheathing and the bottom edge of the roof too.

The homeowner on this job caught it because it fell. If he had spotted the chewing a year earlier, we would have been talking about sealing an entry point and replacing a couple of feet of trim.

If You Are Hearing Something Up There

Go outside and look at your roof edge. Look for chew marks, dark staining, and any spot where the soffit is not tight. If something looks off, or you already heard a bang like this guy did, give us a call and we will come take a look and tell you straight what is going on and what it takes to put it right.