The roofline is the front door
Most wildlife enters from above, not below. The roof-to-soffit junction — where the roof meets the overhang — opens up as houses settle and wood ages, and it's the #1 entry for squirrels, rats, and bats. Attic and gable vents with torn or missing screens are open invitations. Loose flashing around chimneys and roof valleys creates gaps that raccoons pry wider. If you have animals in the attic, the entry is almost always somewhere along the roofline.
The chimney and the vents
An uncapped chimney is a hollow tree to a raccoon or a bat — dark, sheltered, and warm. Raccoons raise babies in chimneys every spring across Orlando. Dryer and bath vents attract starlings and sparrows, which pack them with nesting material (a fire risk on dryer vents). Plumbing and AC penetrations — where pipes and lines pass through walls — often have gaps big enough for mice and rats.
Ground-level entries
Crawl space vents with broken screens let in opossums, armadillos, rats, and snakes. Garage doors that don't seal at the corners admit rats and mice nightly. Pet doors are used by raccoons and opossums as readily as by cats — raccoons learn to push through them in one night. Gaps under sheds and porches become dens for opossums and armadillos.
What the entry tells you
The entry point is a clue to the animal: chewed wood around the hole suggests squirrels; a clean, enlarged gap with rub marks suggests raccoons; tiny gaps with droppings below suggest bats; dug-out earth under a shed suggests armadillos or opossums. During an inspection we read these signs to identify the animal before we ever see it. Our exclusion service finds and seals every one of them.