Just ask this owner of a 115 year old house. They are nasty critters. My mother called them tree rats.

Now raccoons, that's a different matter, but I love them both.

we have a copy of a photo dated 1921 of 2 girls sitting in front of our house with the biggest hair bows we've ever seen. We have several feeding stations for birds and some for the squirrels. Rats chew on plastic, rubber, air conditioning ducts, etc. according to the pest control company that fumigated our house for termites. He said squirrels get the blame but it is not squirrels, it is rats. We have never had any damage like that happen to our old house. We bought it 1982 and do not planning on moving.

Ours is a 1901 Victorian/Queen Anne. It has twelve rooms, a parlor, library, dining room, pocket doors, a maid's pantry and butler's pantry, two staircases and a huge roof with a turret. My husband and I are history buffs, so we made sure the historical integrity was intact - no painting of woodwork and no removal of walls to modernize the house. We've owned it for thirty-five years and will never sell it. I just feel so honored to own a piece of history.

We had a lot of work to do, we did it and I love my house. We have wainscoting topped with a plate shelving all around the dining room, built in buffet (minus the doors), wood cornice trim in both living and dining room, built in shelving on one side of fireplace, and built in storage on the right side like a bench with a lid, probably for wood. It was all painted white and we (mostly me) stripped all the wood, stained it colonial walnut which matched perfectly with the few inches of wood that never got painted. We restored it to it's 1920 original look. My husband took a cabinet making class and built our kitchen cabinets, also built all the missing doors to the builtin in shelves in the DR and LR. In the kitchen, we could actually see on the flooring where cabinets were, so we tried to recreate a 1920's kitchen with room for a dishwasher and a frig. I think we had 10 rooms

We still have original windows with wavy glass. On our street there are at least one house with a double staircase, and 4 with maid quarters. There are no Victorian/Queen Anne houses. Our street was recently completely replaced, the forum asked us how old the house were, we told them when we moved in, the corner concrete was stamped with the street name and 1912. He replied I knew it, because the crushed rock base was so different from more modern streets.

It is like living in a museum, kind of. Whenever someone sees it for the first time, they always say, "Wow, these old houses are great." There is also a house built by the Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan, (certified) 3 doors away. But a couple bought it and modernized it, moved walls, replaced the clinker brick fireplace and painted everything white. Its just awful.
I love old homes too.

No problem with them where I lived in Houston. Mostly live oaks there.

Squirrels are comparably "good animal neighbors."

In fact up until the late 1940s squirrels were kept as pets in numbers that rivaled most other domestic/peri-domestic animals.

Tearing at your screens? I'd be curious what might be provoking them within? A squirrel-obsessed dog perhaps? Maybe not, but that is a common scenario.

I reward them with organic, unsalted walnut pieces.

Red the Fornicating Squirrel
Has his way with all the girls
Just a month and day after
Sunny Toes caught his laughter
Sunny Tummy was debuted
It was weeks before I viewed

They challenge, he chases, then they taunt from the tree tops.

They run across the top of my back fence like acrobats. Love to watch them use their tails for balance and watch them jump between trees.

Mine are extra heavy this year and until I got used to it, when they jump on the roof of the front porch they sound like a small child so I had visions of Chucky attacking. LOL

she will madly dash out the back door even if she is in another room.

The Presbyterian church called a meeting to decide what to do about their squirrel infestation. After much prayer and consideration, they concluded that the squirrels were predestined to be there, and they should not interfere with God’s divine will.

At the Baptist church, the squirrels had taken an interest in the baptistry. The deacons met and decided to put a water-slide on the baptistry and let the squirrels drown themselves. The squirrels liked the slide and, unfortunately, knew instinctively how to swim, so twice as many squirrels showed up the following week.

The Lutheran church decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God’s creatures. So, they humanely trapped their squirrels and set them free near the Baptist church. Two weeks later, the squirrels were back when the Baptists took down the water-slide.

The Episcopalians tried a much more unique path by setting out pans of whiskey around their church in an effort to kill the squirrels with alcohol poisoning. They sadly learned how much damage a band of drunk squirrels can do.

But the Catholic church came up with a more creative strategy! They baptized all the squirrels and made them members of the church. Now they only see them at Christmas and Easter.

Not much was heard from the Jewish synagogue. They took the first squirrel and circumcised him. They haven’t seen a squirrel since.

I think it might have something to do with the sunflower seeds I put out for them, almost every day. Between my sunflower seeds and a neighbor's pecan tree and an absence of predators, they've got it made.