What's the best way to get a live rodent out of my attic?

Do you have access to a have-a-heart trap or something similar?

I would definitely suggest setting a medium sized live trap with some bait, and just check it periodically. If you do catch something… take it far, far away before you release it. At least 1 mile.

Glue traps work well for catching rodents alive, putting them in the corners, or where you can find evidence of a commonly used rodent route. If you don’t care if they are alive or not, buy some D-Con and put that in the routes that they use.

I would strongly recommend making it a dead rodent first. If you have “a rodent” in your attic, then it’s very likely—more likely than not, in fact—that you have “a rodent family” in your attic. Using poisoned bait such as D-Con and equivalent is effective and safe if pets don’t have access to the attic. In addition, the carcasses will be desiccated at death, and therefore won’t raise a stink, should you not locate and dispose of them immediately (since they may choose to die in hard-to-reach spots, and you may never even find the bodies).

If you trap live animals, you may be concerned with whether or not they are diseased before you release them, or even get near them. Hydrophobia (rabies) is something you don’t want to mess with, and hanta virus is even worse.

You will certainly want to find and seal the opening to the outside that allowed them access in the first place, or this will be a recurring thing for you. Keep in mind that in the case of mice, for example, an opening no wider than your thumb may be all that’s required for them to gain entry.

I don’t know… Dead, rotting rodent is very stinky. I paid an exterminator $250 to close all the gaps in my house and trap the rodent, when I had an invader.

First thing you do is find the hole where it is getting in. Then, depending on what kind of rodent it is, you take different steps. If it’s a squirrel, you wait until it leaves the house in the morning to go to work and then you patch the hole so it can’t get back in. You do not want to do this if it has babies inside, but this is not the right time of the year for babies.

If it is a rat, you can patch the hole, but you don’t know if it lives in the house, or not, and you really don’t want to trap it inside. You do need to get rid of it, because it will lead more rats into the house or worse, have babies. You can set rat traps, but you have to get the rat the first time. If the trap goes off without catching the rat, then throw out the trap, because the rats are smart.

We just had a rat problem. We tried three different kinds of traps and it stayed away from all of them. Finally we called the pest lady. She told us we had to patch the wall where the rat was coming in (along the sewer line). That cost us $2500 because we also had to reparge the wall at the same time. It was only an eighth of the basement, at that.

The rat was still with us, so she said we had to lay out “bait.” Poison. We had not wanted to do that because we didn’t want the rat caught in a wall and smelling up everything while it decomposed. But we did what the pest lady said, and she laid out bait and the bait was eaten. We never saw the rat, nor smelled it, but it seems to be gone.

You could go to the poison right away, I guess. It would probably get whatever is up there.

Call pest control. They have one time only visits.

Strobe lights work very well to persuade nocturnal critters to move out. Once you are sure they are gone, block all the entrances!

borrow a cat or a snake and put it up there for a while

@crisw strobe lights always worked for me. I can’t set foot in a disco.