Anybody ever have this happen ?...

I liev in Boston and it's getting cold at nite (around 30 F) and
snow around corner...

I pop the hood ( '89 TA with stock 350 autoT dual cats)...
I see a little pile of maple leaf seeds (helicopters) (it's Fall yaknow
and leaves and stuff falling always) on top of the center cover
between the V-8.

Obviously this is the warmest best place dor a squirrel or chipmonk(s) to slip in and get a nice warm snoooooz for nite!!

Also they stock up and bring in a bunch more of these maple tree
seeds and pile them up right under the top center cover in the well area between the two valve covers.

I have been air-blowing out all these stupid seeds for past two weeks (no kidding!) on top and under the cover and keep finding more the next day I go up to fire 'er up.

Whatda I have to do ? Set up a mouse trap or something??
Getting kinda sick and tired of having all this tree-debris under the hood every day !
(kinda waiting I hope to see the squirrels etc go into hibernation!)
(but not under "my" hood !!!)

 

dude that is just too funny..... i have no idea what you would do to get rid of them though.. Put a little bowl of antifreeze under there, maybe they will drink that.

 

Few yrs back when I worked at Wal-Mart, a friend of mine told me how he pulled a cat out of a woman's engine bay, I'd just like to know how the fugger survived.

 

You have got to get pictures of this lol

I have never heard of them making a nest or something lol....

Sure getting caught in something and bloody and what not, but this is hillarious!

 

Just leave the doors unlocked and the keys in so he will get in there and turn the heat on and he can sleep in the seat! Had a mouse build a nest in the trunk of my wifes new Honda Accord. That little rascal tore the carpet all to hell pulling on it to build his nest. I finally got him out and let him go in the field. Have Fun!!!

 

see even animals love our cars!!

 

I've had cars infested by mice that way... they lived in teh air cleaner, blcoked the duct with under-hood blanket material... yukkkk

If you don't use the carfor months at a time (like winter!!), try a few moth ***** wherever they go. In the air cleaner etc.

 

hahahahahahhah my dad works about 20 miles from my house right. One day he came home and we were out playing basketball and heard something. Got closer to the old nissan he used to have and there was a cat under the hood trapped behind the battery. We got it out and ended up keeping it LOL i dont know how it survived like that.

 

Hey, at least they survived. One day when I was working at Dodge this lady came in and said her car was making a strange noise and smelled funny. Well I was the one lucky enough to work on the car. I opened the hood of the car and puked everything that I had eaten in the past week! A raccoon had got under the hood of her Intrepid and went to sleep. Well she started it up and it ripped the Raccoon to shreds. Had to be the nastiest thing I'd ever seen. So I backed it out and sent it over to our car wash guys, boy were they pissed.

 

Yeah, it's not unusual for a cat to curl up in the fan shroud at night because it's a warm place. But then it'll get shredded by the fan when the car is started in the morning

 

Let him go in a field??? i woulda kill him.


well actually, i woulda mad him a nice home since he was wrecking a honda, but if it was my camaro, he wouldve gotten dead!

 

Stay on top of it. The (rodents) will eat rubber stuff, like plug wires, hoses, rubber insulation around injector wires, hood insulation makes great bedding. I know from first hand experience. Cost me about $700 to get it all replaced. Not fun..

 

I'd take the mouse trap advice. Go get some of your own seeds to bait it It's better to have a dead rodent in your engine bay than a living one eating your money.

 

Except maybe a dead mouse you can't find! Noooo!

 

:nono: Don't try this, you'll be very sorry if you do.... At the shop i work in they tryed to poison the rats (what a big mistake that was..), they ate the poison ran off and died it took us weeks to find them all..

 

RB83L69 had it right. Mothballs where they go will keep them out.

 

I bet you've got a mouse under your hood. Who knows, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll make way for a rat...

 

That's a common problem down here. You can try a couple of things:

1. Rat Poison, but it doesn't always work!

2. Moth *****. Place moth ***** around the engine compartment.

3. If you can find predator urine in a local gardening center, spray that in the engine (it won't stink too long).

 

I doubt it's squirrels ... they like it high in the trees, and they don't venture out after dark. Cat, raccoon maybe.

I have lost a cat or 2 in my childhood from them crawling into my dad's cars at night to keep warm ... quite gross when the fan blades chew one up!

I'm no expert, but mothballs sound good. Maybe an old pair of panyhose, stuffed with *****, tied shut, and strapped under hood with a cable tie. It's also hunting season, so the urine should be easy to get at Walmart. Maybe fox urine would scare it away.

Another thought was one of those electronic rodent deterrant things - they plug in the wall, and make sonic noise or something - could run an extension cord to car and plug one up. However, might make the neighborhood dogs howl.

What about ammonia? That stuff really smells bad! In an empty windex bottle - spray on ground around car at night. I'm guessing now.

I have lost a cat or 2 in my childhood from them crawling into my dad's cars at night to keep warm ... quite gross when the fan blades chew one up!

Good luck!

 

Yea, its probably mice. Gotta watch those suckers thier droppings can have some nasty stuff . In the news awhile back a guy working on his mouse dropping infested car cut himself and contracted Haunta virus from the mouse droppings. He died about a week later. My cure all for mice, rats, squirrls and small rabbits is a 20lb cat named Food.

 

I had a mouse venture into the heater-A/C fan. The fan would vibrate like hell on high! After abt 3 hot summer days, the smell was unbearable..

Also had a cat sleeping on the eng once. It lost its' tail that morn.
Cat never went near the car again..

Sounds like you're getting some pretty good advice on this one.
Good luck with it.

 

Well... It's about 3 weeks or more now... and the dam
thing (whatever it is) is STILL in there....
Here in Boston - it's been prettttty Cold (around 20 - 25 F)
at nite and windchill even lower...

Two nites ago I found about 50 of those maple tree seeds/wings piled up ontop of the flat silver engine block cover nearest to the firewall (warmest part of engine after running).

I have a '89 TA with 350 stock engine everything - nothing at
all modified.

It's really pissing me offffffffffff....

I pop the hood every day at 4pm when I go out and warm it up and drive it around for about 15 minutes and park it back for the nite (I have only an open bay roof covering - no enclosed garage - (I wish)). I clean these dam stupid maple seeds out the best I can.

I set a small mouse trap on ground outside the car next to front wheel with some cheese to see if I can catch something.!
No luck so far.

THANKS for ALL the TIPS.... I will try the mothball thing.

My guess... either a small field mouse or chipmunk ?

What about this I thought....

Just throwing a old blanket over inside of engine over the part where animal is hiding and try to make it harder for him to get
under the cover etc ?
(probably would just make it MORE comfortable, huh?)

Thanks anyways... whataaa PITA

 

I had some rodents (squirrles I think) living in the hood insulation on my old 89 Caprice. I had to remove the hood insulation since it was starting to sag on the engine, then we took ammonia and sprayed the underside of the hood while it was off, then replaced the insulation after the smell went away.

-The Gunny

 

the blanket thing would be a bad idea. rodents can get just about anywhere.

 

just as an aside, if you think it might be a mouse, try peanut better as a bait. it is one of the best baits for mice. hope you find the critter and get him out of there.

 

Well this would really **** me off if an animal found their way under the hood of one of my cars. I can attest to the antifreeze trick. It worked for me. A can of sardines with some of the 'sweet green stuff' took care of that little problem. As for the mice, you'll be amazed at how many you'll kill with mouse traps with peanut butter or cheese as bate. I keep a couple traps in my garage, and I used some expanding foam to insulate the areas where they were sneaking in. The garage is pretty much 'mice-proof' now. Haven't have a problem since. Good luck!!!

 

When i was about 10 my dad went to work in his truck.. Our cat had just had a litter of kittens about 2-3 months prior to this... well... long story short.. he was at work one day.. about 20 miles away from the house.. and someone came it to get some food for the 3 kittens runnin around the parking lot. My dad went out to see the kittens and sure enough.. they were our 3 kittens. They road under the truck somewhere all the way to work and were just out playing around in the parking lot of the place my dad worked at.

 

I hear dryer sheets are a good mouse deterrent.

 

I worked at Jiffy Lube for a while (yeah, I know... loved working on cars, hated ripping people off,so I quit) We saw this somewhat frequently. It wasn't usually in our "lesser" cars with the garbage can air cleaner, but trucks with the big circular filters and especially cars with the large boxes (like most fuelie cars). We didn't always see the animals, since I'm guessing the noise scared them, but we would see nests and what-not in the air boxes. Especially in cars that were owned by people that lived out in the countryside somewhere. Though, one time, one guy had put a large bag of a white powder substance in his air cleaner. I say white powder substance because A. I didn't taste it, B. I wouldn't know what those drugs tasted like and C. I wasn't about to ask the owner of the car. Other than the really, really pretty cars that drove in sometimes, that was probably the most interesting thing I saw.

 

hmm. (picturing little white mouse being sucked into an engine while nesting in the air box)

 

i'm from az and we have all sorts of little critters that love to make nests in cars. after replacing many parts under the hood we came up with a solution. we covered the entire underside of the car with chickenwire with access flaps so that we could still do basic maintnence. just an idea that worked for me.

 

>> I hear dryer sheets are a good mouse deterrent

Why or how do Dryer sheets bother/annoy a mouse?

Is it the chemical or smell of them or something ?

Latest - I just set a plain simple 'ole mouse trap with peanut butter right up inside the hood right ontop of the engine cover
where I've been finding all the maple seeds.
Also put out about 5 mothballs around inside engine hood too.

We'll see what happens...
BlueTA89
"To catch a mouse"

 

About the closest thing I can relate to this is my wifes Jeep. When we bought it from a dealer, it was leaking windshield washer fluid. So we brought it back to have it checked out where they swapped out the washer resovoir. After doing this, they showed us what had happened. There were gnaw marks in the bottle from a small animal that had chewed through it. I'm thinking there must be a dead or drunk squirrel running around after drinking all that fluid.

 

Hehehe. I just remembered a few years ago when a stray doberman decided to have its puppies under my dad's pickup one morning. There was no way it let anyone get near the truck.

 

Never actually tried it myself, but yes, it's supposedly the smell. When I first read it (I think in a Popular Mechanics or something) I did a search on the internet and found 5 or 6 sites all somewhat backing it up. But you know how internet information is. I say it's worth a shot. At the very least your car will smell good. ^_^

 

well the lil rat thing is STILL hanging around....

Tried the mothballls thingy...I even created a three baggy sorta thing homemade thing using a women's short nylon sock and piled a load of mothballs ($2.89 per box of 25 or so) into 3 little
nylon sock bags tied them all 3 together (to easily pick them up and remove daily when I was ready to move car) and laid them directly on top of engine block and let hang over side of the
header pipes...

Guess what...?!!
Mothballs (Napthelene?) I found out will quickly melt melt
and turn to a liquid and evaporate with a little heat like engine...

ohhh also... real nice too... the mothballs melted will stick kinda badly to the metal engine block cover.... really sucks and smells
bad...

But it seems to sorta help deter the mouse from settleing in so nice and cozy anymore....

Soooo... to prevent the sticking to my nice car engine I now drop the 3-nylon bagger of mothballs onto a piece of aluminum foil and place that whole thing ontop of the engine cover instead & can quickly pick it up and replace when I come back home... Helps to lessen wasting so much time etc !!!

I also.... added a couple ole fashion mouse traps on ground next to tires with usual peanut butter bait.... He so fast or smart it's been taking bait for last week and not getting caught and sometimes trap not going off.... at least good thing is I know he is still around and just wating for him to screw up once...

BBUTT.... I will get the sucker I am persistent and no mouse aint gonna make a fool of me and my TA baby !!!

 

My bother lives in a wodded area. He pissed some squirls off. They decided to make a nest under the hood of his truck. Chewd the wires to the ECT, Hoodlight, 3 vacume hooses, and the underhood foam, along with a intake full over acorns.

I got a kick out of it, but he didnt.

Best of luck on your rodant chase!!

 

ROFLMAO!! OMG some of these stories. The way my lifes been going the past week and a half I needed that, Thank You!!

As for your bait on the mouse trap try something you have to actually sit there & munch on to eat. We had a problem with mice in our house a while back. Hince we have a cat but I swear shes like Garfield and is LAZY!!! Our mice were running off with Peanut Butter & Cheese without setting off the trap. Finally caught all 5 of them in one night using cake icing (the really sweet kind you get on a store made cake) and the glazed outter part of a doughnut hole. hehe

 

As far as bait, peanut butter is definitely a winner... cheese, I've never in my life caught a mouse with that.... starchy things seem to get them: ****, pasta, biscuit dough, things like that. Pay attention to what they break into if you ever have them in your house, I guarantee it won't be the cheese

 

You guys are talking about killing perfectly good snake food!

...so you know what I would do with them.

 

Hahahahaha!!! It won't let me talk about ****! Rîce! R¡ce!!! This is too much fun. Anyway, not the stuff that people put those park-bench-sized wings on and paint tennis-ball green with white wheels, but rather the cereal grain.

 

i wonder what the mouse (or whatever it is) is thinking. hes prolly laughing his *** off because he's outsmarted a human with the traps!! o this thread is great keep it up!!

 

I had a friend that hit a dog on his way to work at walmart. He said he was running late so he didn't stop (drove a beater). He got to work around 5a.m. and he worked till noon when he went out to his little truck there was the dog up in the wheel well. He said it looked like war. Blood everywhere. Don't know how it stayed in there but I thought it was funny.

 

Hey, I've got one of those 5" long Afghani cockroackes living in the block of my 88 Firebird project, you can use him to run the squirrel out..... You have to come get Osama out, though.

 

Osama the Afghani cockroach? :sillylol:

good luck with your pest problems, guys!

 

Four words:

20 Gauge Spread Shot

 

What's a good cat deterrent? The car's big hood is prime real estate for my neighborhood cats. I have tracks all over it in the morning. Sometimes muddy. Sometimes they don't make it up, especially when I just waxed it, and they slide all over it... The back window has permanent scratches going up, from the mud I guess. I think they get a better grip on the painted areas. I wish I had a garage.

 

now how in the hell are you going to find predator urine.. even if you did find some on the ground how the hell woudl you get it into a spray bottle?!?!!?!? i guess u could get your cat to whiz in the top and give em a treat... just my 2 cents

 

That's funny 84Z28 lmao. lol. It does seem a little far fetch. (Predator urine). But, you will probably be surprised that Walmart sells it especially this time of year. They sell fox **** in a spray bottle in the hunting section and they even sell racoon **** in a spray bottle too. It is for deer hunters to cover their scent in the woods. LOL.

 

in our combine, we put citrus scents (lemons and oranges) in the cracks and crevices to keep the mice from nesting and chewing through wiring. Downside of that is it tends to attract raccoons and some larger wildlife, but they'd probally go away if you pissed on your car at night....so **** on your car, and throw oranges at it and you'll be fine....really

On the other hand, 12 gauges fix anything