How to Keep Squirrels Off Your Porch

A porch gives a squirrel three things: spilled seed, soft soil in pots, and a dry sheltered ledge. Remove those, close the access routes, and the traffic drops. Sprays are the last five percent.

Step 1: remove the food

• Move bird feeders at least 15 to 20 feet from the porch, and fit a baffle
• Sweep up spilled seed daily, or fit a catch tray
• Switch to hulled seed so there is no shell litter at ground level
• Pepper-treated seed — birds are unaffected by capsaicin, squirrels are not
• Take in pet bowls and anything edible left out
• Lidded, latched bins. A bungee across a lid is not a latch
• Clear fallen fruit from anything overhanging

Step 2: harden the planters

Squirrels cache nuts in pots because the soil is loose, soft and always in the same place.

Grit still lets water through and reduces evaporation, so it costs the plant nothing.

Step 3: close the access routes

Squirrels jump around six to eight feet horizontally, and further downward.

• Prune overhanging branches back about 10 ft from the porch roof and railings
• Smooth metal bands around wooden posts — 2 ft wide, well above jumping height from the ground
• Downpipe guards or a smooth sleeve on the lower section
• Trim climbers — ivy, wisteria and climbing roses are ladders
• Move the trellis, the woodpile and the trash cans away from the structure
• Check the fence line. A fence that runs to the porch is a highway

Step 4: the furniture and the chewing

Incisors grow continuously and have to be worn down, and wood that has absorbed winter de-icing salt or hand sweat is more attractive than clean timber.

• Store cushions indoors or in a latched box — foam and fabric are prime nest lining in spring
• Capsaicin chew deterrent on the chewed edges, refreshed every week or two
• Metal or composite rather than softwood on the elements they attack most
• Rinse off de-icing salt in spring; it is part of why railings get gnawed
• Fix the damage promptly. A chewed edge is a marked edge and gets returned to

Step 5: active deterrents, in order of what works

Worth using:

• Motion-activated sprinkler — genuinely effective on an open deck, slow to habituate to
• A dog or cat with access — the strongest deterrent on the list
• Capsaicin sprays on surfaces, reapplied after rain
• Removing the shelter — closing in a sheltered corner they nest or sit in

Not worth it:

• Ultrasonic devices — no reliable evidence
• Fake owls and plastic snakes — a few days, then ignored
• Mothballs — a pesticide, illegal used this way in many places, and genuinely hazardous in an enclosed porch
• Greasing railings or posts — ruins the finish, traps birds and insects, and squirrels find another route
• Poison — not legal for squirrels in many places and it kills whatever eats the carcass

If they are nesting in the porch roof

That is a different job from keeping them off the deck.

• Find every entry point, not just the obvious one
• Do not seal between roughly February and April or August and October, when unweaned young may be inside
• Use a one-way exclusion door, let them leave, then close the gap with heavy-gauge metal mesh or sheet
• Repair the structural cause — a rotten fascia, a lifted soffit, a gap at the roof-wall junction

Sealed without checking, a nest of young dies in the cavity, and that becomes a smell problem you have to open the roof to fix.