Scratching in the Loft During the Morning - Could It Be Squirrels?

Time of Day Is the Strongest Clue

Squirrels are diurnal and their activity peaks in the couple of hours after sunrise and again in the late afternoon. Heavy movement at seven or eight in the morning that then goes quiet for the middle of the day is close to a signature.

Rats and mice are the opposite — active from dusk and through the night, quiet by morning. Birds start at first light and are loudest in spring. If you are being woken at 3am, that is not squirrels.

What the Sound Itself Tells You

Squirrels sound heavy. Rolling, dragging, thumping, and often a single animal moving decisively across a distance. People frequently describe something being moved about up there, and sometimes hear an actual rolling noise, which is a stored nut or a bit of debris.

Rats sound like scurrying with weight behind it and gnawing. Mice are lighter and faster, more of a scratching and rustling than a thump, and usually closer to the ceiling surface than the ridge. Birds are a scrabbling and fluttering with cheeping, and are usually at the edge of the roof rather than the middle.

The Things That Are Not Animals

Worth ruling out before paying anyone. Roof timbers tick and crack as they heat and cool, which is why noises often start at dawn and at dusk in exactly the way an animal would. Water pipes and expanding heating pipes knock and click on a timer. Loose felt, a lifted tile or a bird-guard on a flue makes an intermittent noise in wind.

The test is whether it correlates with weather, wind or the heating coming on rather than with time of day. Something that only happens when it is windy is not living up there.

The Season Matters Too

Squirrels have two main breeding periods, roughly late winter and midsummer, and lofts get noticeably busier around those — a female with young in a drey in your insulation is both louder and considerably more determined to stay.

Autumn brings caching behaviour and a lot of carrying about. Spring is when birds nesting in the eaves generate a fortnight of noise that stops by itself, which is worth knowing before you book anything.

What to Do Next

Get into the loft in daylight with a torch and look for droppings, tunnels through the insulation, gnawed timber or cable, and a nest of shredded material against something warm. Then look at the roofline from outside for a gap at the eaves, the soffit, or the junction where an extension roof meets the wall.

If it is squirrels, this is a £280 trapping service with legal duties attached — grey squirrels cannot lawfully be released once caught — and the animals come out before anything is sealed. Gnawed cable is the reason not to leave it a month.