The Facts of Property Life

Cute when frolicking in the trees, cute when chasing its mate, cute when it nicks food from the bird feeder, it was even cute when the pitter patter of its little feet was audible as it scurried in the loft. Cute but dangerous: squirrels chew through wiring, which can cause fires. In came the pest-removal man, out went the squirrel, and that little episode cost a bit of dosh.

When you buy a pet, you do it voluntarily and know that certain costs come with ownership.

When you buy a house, you expect ordinary wear and tear. You don't foresee animals that you have not bought and do not own eating into your budget.

For many owners, animals form part of the unpredictable side of property maintenance.

Boilers falter. Paint fades. Sinks leaks. Tiles loosen. This is not news.

What about bees?

A few weeks after I move into my new house, a swarm of bees gathers near the front door and buzzily starts digging holes in the earth, even penetrating - indeed, preferring - rock-hard ground.

No other house on my road has bees, or a bee problem. There is something about my house that attracts them, and that something is a small patch at the front beneath the gas meter. They visit annually.

When they arrived the first time, I phoned my local-council pest-control department. They could send someone over, for a fee. A neighbour suggested I contact a pest-control man she knew. A bill for services rendered looked likely in any event.

Instead of making an appointment to visit me, he said that I should first try the stick-probe trick: insert a stick into the holes and see how far in it goes. I probe several holes, find that they are less than an inch deep, and report back.

Yes, just as he expected. Sand bees. They gather sand and deliver it to their hive some distance away. If I leave them alone, they will leave me alone and, furthermore, will leave period. Indeed, a week or two later, they left. He was correct, and he didn’t ask for payment. He could have stung me but didn't.

(Many years earlier I occupied a house in which water suddenly cascaded nonstop from the overflow pipe. I rang a plumber, who arrived, stood at the front door, and instructed me to climb into the loft and see if the ballcock in the water tank was stuck. It was. I flicked it and it came unstuck. Water started filling the tank. Problem solved. Although the plumber did nothing more than show up and make that single suggestion, he got his callout fee.)

Mutual admiration society

The bees return to the same part of the front garden every year in early spring. Sometimes they do battle with other bees but they never bother me, and I am careful to never bother them.

I was financially lucky with the bees, less fortunate some years later after I heard a pitter patter in the loft. Thinking - hoping - the source of the noise was a mouse, I set a humane mouse trap but it caught nothing and the tapping continued.

Curious and armed with a torch, I climbed into the loft and stood still. Within a minute, the scurrying noise resumed. I pointed the torch a saw a squirrel staring at me from a distance of about ten feet. It moved toward me, whereupon I made a hasty retreat.

Squirrels are very cute…and very dangerous. They bite through wiring and cause fires and other serious damage. This squirrel was using insulating fibre, cardboard, bits of wood and anything else it could find for its nest. Evidence of gnawing was everywhere.

It was commuting between my loft and, through an unreachable hole, the loft next door. My neighbours and I chipped in and hired a squirrel expert who caught and removed the squirrel. He also sealed the hole - a leftover from a disused overflow pipe - that had served as the squirrel's door.

[UPDATE - Some two years later, a new squirrel asserted squatter's rights in the loft (the patched hole has a hole in its patch). The remedy this time was a squirrel-friendly cage trap, which did not come free but was considerably cheaper than the squirrel pest-controller.]

Foxes are everywhere in my part of southwest London, and if you are not careful in summer, they enter through the garden door and, sometimes, do not leave before you lock up for the night.

One summer night, I was awakened by sporadic and barely audible knocking noises. Probably nothing, I thought, but I also detected a mighty whiff wafting through the entire house. Something was not right.

The only thing amiss that I could find was fairly damning evidence: there in the sink in the bathroom, which is downstairs, was, how can I put this? Someone or something had pooed in the sink. I guessed fox. And I did not want to corner it, on purpose or accidentally.

Assuming that it wanted out as much as I wanted it out, I opened the front and rear doors, retreated to the bedroom, and hoped for the best. Apparently he left as soon as he felt the coast was clear. I never actually saw it.

Frequent visitors, the parakeets are attractive and entertaining, except to the sparrows, robins, tits, finches and others for whom the seeds are intended.

I was lucky, both financially and in terms of inconvenience. Afterward, neighbours told me that a homeowner down the road had gone away on holiday unaware that he had locked a fox inside his house. He returned to find much of his furniture ruined, chewed by a fox desperately hungry and desperate for freedom during its two-week imprisonment.

A humane mouse trap costs perhaps a quid; humane cage-traps for larger animals are more expensive. Human pest-controllers are costlier still.

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