Rats and mice in Miami-Dade

The rat in a Miami-Dade attic is almost always the roof rat: dark, slender, long-tailed, a climber that comes in along tree branches, palm fronds, the power drop, and the soffit vents. It eats the mangoes and avocados in the yard, nests in the insulation, chews the AC line set and the wiring, and breeds year-round. Norway rats stay low, in the sewer lines and under the slab, and mice are rare here outside of dense buildings. Which one you have changes where the traps go.

Poison in the attic is the wrong first move: the rat dies in the wall and you live with the smell for weeks, and a poisoned rat that gets outside kills the owl or the neighbor’s cat that eats it. The licensed approach is trap, then seal, then prevent. Call or send the form and a company that serves your area calls you back to schedule it.

Signs

• Scratching, scurrying, or gnawing in the ceiling or walls at night, especially just after dark and before dawn.
• Droppings: dark, spindle-shaped, the size of a grain of rice or larger, in the garage, the pantry, the attic, behind the water heater.
• Grease rub marks along a beam or a pipe, chewed fruit on the ground under the mango, a hollowed-out orange still hanging on the tree.
• Chewed insulation on the AC copper lines outside, wires in the attic, the rubber sweep on the garage door, the screen on a soffit vent.
• A pet staring at a spot on the ceiling.

What the company does

The first visit is an inspection of the roofline, the soffits, the vents, the AC and utility penetrations, the garage door, and the yard: every gap a rat can get through, which is anything a thumb fits in. Then snap traps or stations on the runways in the attic and along the outside walls, checked and reset over a series of visits until the activity stops. Then exclusion: hardware cloth and sealant on every entry found, the garage door sweep replaced, the vent screens repaired, and trimming advice for the branches and fronds that touch the roof. Exclusion done before the trapping is finished seals rats inside; done after, it is what keeps the next ones out.

Expect a report with photos of the entry points and what was sealed, and a warranty on the exclusion work. Attic cleanup and insulation replacement, if the infestation was long, are a separate quote and sometimes a separate company.

What you can do now

• Pick up fallen fruit, and pick ripe fruit off the tree. Move the bird feeder. Keep pet food inside.
• Trim branches and fronds back from the roof by four to six feet if you can, or note which ones touch.
• Store what is in the garage in sealed bins rather than boxes and bags.
• Do not use poison or glue boards. Do not seal the hole you found until the trapping is done.

What drives the cost

We do not set or quote prices. The company’s number depends on the number of trapping visits, the number and difficulty of the entry points to seal (a roofline with many soffit gaps and a tile roof is more work than a block house with a flat roof), whether attic cleanup is needed, and the warranty term. A written proposal comes after the inspection; price, timing, and warranty are between you and the company.