Household pests I have known: A personal history

Camel cricket (photo by Thegreenj, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Marlene Berlin

Cockroaches, mice, flies, camel crickets, stink bugs, flying squirrels. They’ve all taken up residence in my home at one time or another.

My husband and I moved into the District in 1975 from an apartment on New Hampshire Avenue by the Beltway. We saved up for a home in a walkable neighborhood and purchased a house in Dupont Circle, just east of 16th Street on Corcoran Street. We inherited wonderful human tenants in our English basement, and unbeknownst to us at the time, cockroaches.

These cockroaches liked to hang out in our kitchen, and were especially drawn to a clock radio on the counter. They were so thick at times, they obscured the hands of the clock. But I must say that neither my husband nor I were much put out by them. I only knew from the ants, bats and pigeons my parents battled as I was growing up in central Pennsylvania. And, I worked with cockroaches in my college biology lab. As for my husband’s tolerance, I have not a clue.

We settled into a coexistence, but that ended when we invited another couple over for dinner. As they were leaving, the wife said they would not be returning until we got rid of the cockroaches. I then realized that other people might not be so blasé about these critters. We hired an exterminator and evicted the bugs.

Then, we started noticing mouse droppings in the cupboards. Out came the mousetraps. We caught several mice, including two in one trap on top of the stove. People were still accepting our dinner invitations, and one friend who came over spotted two more mice emerging from a burner. She suggested that we get a cat. We were still neophyte homeowners and should have been looking for how the mice were getting into the house, but we got lucky. Our new tenants downstairs had a cat, and soon we no longer had a mouse problem.

When we moved to Forest Hills, the types of pests we encountered multiplied. We had ants and got ant traps. The flies that came out in the winter were caught with good old-fashioned fly paper. An occasional stink bug would appear on a wall, and I would brush it onto a piece of paper and drop it outside. One of my daughters was beside herself about camel crickets in the basement, and we got glue traps.

I overruled her objection to spiders, however. I told her they would control the insect pests.

And lest you think the mice leave us alone here, we do spot them on occasion. The sightings were infrequent enough that we left them alone, until one died behind a wall and caused a terrible stench. Now, the traps come out.

We learned of our most unexpected uninvited guests when we started hearing noises in the attic at night. Then, my daughter who was living in Philadelphia came to visit. She heard an animal scurrying in a crawl space in our basement. And she was very clear: “This is no mouse.”

I contacted a wild animal control company I learned of through my neighbor, Mary Cheh, an animal lover who once needed to get a raccoon unstuck from an air conditioning vent. Brandon from District Wildlife Solutions delivered the verdict: flying squirrels.

We had worried our unwelcome guests were rats, so that came as a relief. The squirrels had gotten in through a space under the eaves of the roof, traveled through the walls into the basement, and had climbed into the crawl space.

Plaster fills the holes after flying squirrels created an entryway to the basement crawl space.

Brandon sealed up the house, leaving an escape hatch where the flying squirrels could get out but could not get back in. He told us it would take a couple of weeks for them to leave. They needed more time than that to give up the shelter of our home, but my husband and I are no longer awakened in the middle of the night by their noise. And my daughter has not complained. Though, during one of her recent visits, I held my breath. I had spotted a camel cricket in the basement.