Roof raider
April 28th, 2006 by ktula
The last few weeks, my neighbors and i have been hearing a weird scratching sound that seemed to emanate from the wall between the master bedroom and its bathroom or the attic. The noise almost always appears in the morning between 0600 and 0900. Our concern was the possibility of rodents, birds or squirrels living in the our attics or worse, in the walls.
I tried to climb up to my attic to see what’s going on but i do not have a long enough ladder to accomplish that. All i could do was to poke my head up in the attic. It was impossible to see anything in the attic because it was filled with those pink color fiber glass insulation material. I have a really bad experience with the same insulation material when i was working for the University of Kansas student housing one summer when i was in college. Even though i was wearing a mask, i must have breathed in enough of those crap to cough for the next few days. Oh yeah, my hands were itchy as hell because somehow the loose fiber glass material got onto my palms. So even if i could get hold of a tall enough ladder, i probably would not have gone into the attic.
Two days ago, we even got a pest control guy to investigate what’s been waking me and my neighbors up early in the morning. Jim from Eden pest control did a visual inspection of all our attics (4 units) and looked around to spot any possible openings. From what he saw, our units are very well sealed so it was very unlikely that animals could have gone up to our attics.
Yesterday morning, i decided to set up a “sting” operation to find out the source of this noise. My initial thought was that the noise could come from the roof. I told one of my neighbors to call me on my cell when she hears the noise. So at 0630, i went up to the Tower roof top with my camcorder. After waiting for about 15 minutes, i noticed a crow flew up to our roof and to my total surprise, starting jumping onto what appeared to be a ventilation pipe protruding out on the roof. There are 2 pipes from each unit that stick out on the roof. The crow jumped onto the pipe, starting pecking at it with its beak. Then, it would jump down from the top of the pipe and started pecking at the bottom of the pipe. This was repeated for about a minute. Sure enough, my neighbor called and told me she was hearing the strange noise again. Mystery solved!
I have no clue why the crow has taken a liking to the ventilation pipes on our roof. As irritating as it has been the last few weeks, it was a relief to know that we do not have any rodent problem in our units.
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