Friday I heard some weird scratching around in the direction of my living room chimney. As far as I know, this chimney was never used and when I made some energy saving upgrades, they actually sealed it off with some foam core bard sealed in place with spray foam. After hearing it a few more times, I went up on the roof to shine a light down the flue and see if I could see anything. I could see all the way down, but couldn’t see anything at the bottom (there are two flues, one I think was for the furnace, but when that was upgraded they started venting out the side of the house, so the chimney has no real purpose anymore). I don’t think a bird or squirrel could have gotten down there because the screen over the chimney was still in place and seemed to still be effective. Then I went down in the crawlspace to see if I could see anything and of course that was no good either.
Saturday I heard some more scratching. I would go over to the chimney to listen and it would stop. Buddy Baer was very interested in this and he would “help” by whining. The weird thing is the damper is actually closed, so even if something got in, I don’t know if it could get past the damper. I decided to cut out some of the foam core since it sounded like whatever it was was right on the foam core. The other possibility is that it could be a mouse or rat, so it is a little scary opening this hole so that a rat can get into the house. I put an empty kitchen garbage can under the hole so if a mouse fell out, he would land in the garbage can and hopefully couldn’t climb the plastic walls. I was watching The Nutcracker and the Four Realms which has a lot of mice in it, so it was weird watching this movie with all of these mice and knowing there was something crawling around in the chimney. With the hole in place, now the noise was much louder. I tried to close off the fireplace with the curtain, so if anything missed or got out of the garbage can, it would still be trapped in the fireplace. I also pushed the square of foam core back in place figuring it would either keep whatever was up there in place or act like a trap door for the garbage can to collect if anything walked across it. And I went to bed thinking I really need to pest proof the house again, which I had done about ten years ago.
This morning, I looked in the garbage can to see if anything had fallen in. Nothing. A little later I was looking towards the fireplace, not having heard anything, and noticed what looked like a big grasshopper hanging on the inside of the fireplace curtain. I looked closer and it was actually a green anole lizard. It wasn’t too hard to direct him into the garbage can and take him outside. He still looked pretty healthy for starving for two days. He definitely didn’t want to be handled, but was happy to be outside in the bushes. I’m happy it was just a lizard. And also happy it was able to get out alive. He made a lot of noise to be so small.