Chipmunks are cute little rodents but despite their adorable appearance, they can cause some serious damage to your house. While they don’t often choose to live inside our homes, in pursuit of food, chipmunks will access just about any place they can. And as they are not able to survive more than three days without food, they’ll start to chew on anything whenever they’re hungry.
This way, with their chewing and gnawing behaviors, chipmunks can damage any items on your property, including parts in both the exterior and interior of the building. They will chew and gnaw on wood, walls, plastic, insulation, electrical wires, the siding of your house, or anything else that crosses their path.
As chipmunks are equipped with strong teeth, they are able to chew on everything that surrounds them, so they can easily chew through drywall as well. Drywall is relatively a weak, brittle, and light wall material, making it prone to damage like holes and cracks caused by wildlife such as chipmunks.
Chipmunks have a set of powerful teeth, especially their front teeth, which are constantly growing, so these rodents need to keep on chewing on things to grind their teeth down.
Consisting of gypsum sandwiched between two paperboards, drywall is not a very sturdy material and, especially as your house ages, it gets brittle and your walls get stressed out. Chipmunks’ teeth enable them to gnaw on hard objects and materials, so your drywall is not a hurdle for them.
Luckily, drywall is cheap comparing to solid wood and plaster, which makes most drywall damage to be repaired quickly and at less cost. Make sure to never seal a hole in the wall before inspecting that there’s no chipmunk or other pest trapped inside.
When a chipmunk makes its way inside, it will gnaw through a baseboard into the crawlspace, and burrow through the drywall to settle in between walls. The rodent might also dig through the insulation to make a tunnel in the wall.
Whenever these pests become residents in your house, their gnawing habit is definitely not good news for you. If a chipmunk was able to squeeze in through a hole in your wall, it can keep on chewing to make that hole larger or make new holes for easy access points. This will not only damage the structure of your house but also cause drafts and make the heat escape outdoors through these holes. This is a waste of money and energy from your heating appliance, which makes you spend more money on your heating bills.
Therefore, it is important to find out exactly where the chipmunk is entering your home and repair the hole, no matter how small or inaccessible it is. You don’t want to take the chance that more chipmunks or other wild animals find their way inside. Also, chipmunk issues can lead to rat, mice, or squirrel problems.
Chipmunks are not very keen on climbing through walls and coming indoors to occupy your home. This environment is certainly outside of the natural place they like to live in. The little bugger who has entered there by accident will be desperate to get out.
However, they can sometimes get into the home looking for food, shelter, and warmth. This is when they get quite destructive and can tear down your soffit sections and gnaw through the roof shingles. If they get inside the attic, they will build their nests tearing up the insulation, eat the grout out from between the tiles, or pull up the carpeting. There’s a high chance of damage caused to stairs, patios, stone and retaining walls, and foundations by weakening them with the rodents’ burrows.
Chipmunk Infestation Signs
There are two most obvious signs indicating that a chipmunk, or the whole family, is taking up residence in your house. Since chipmunks, just like other rodents, have strong and constantly growing front teeth, they will leave chew marks on the walls. Thus, look for small tooth marks on the corners of the walls and scratches around the holes in the structure.
In addition to the visible signs of chipmunk damage, you might be hearing sounds in the wall. Chipmunks are very loud and make a wide range of noises, especially when they’re active and moving around inside the walls. Even if you’re not able to see the animal, rushing and scratching sounds can be heard in the wall as it tries to dig around.
Also, their distinctive “chip chip” sounds which they make with their teeth, is too close to be outside. If you are sure to have chipmunks living in your wall, you need to humanely trap and remove them. In nearly all home situations, eliminating chipmunks with traps has proven to be the most practical method.
However, trapping must be done only when there are no young present. Because the babies will starve, the mother will destroy your walls as she tries to reach them.
It’s important to start your trapping and removal efforts at the first sign of a chipmunk infestation. Contact our Peachtree Pest Control team in Atlanta, GA, for more information on the chipmunk extermination service and to request a free inspection.