Rat & Mouse Control Melbourne

Rat, mouse — or possum? We usually know before we arrive

When you call about scratching in the roof, the first thing we ask is: what time are you hearing it, and how long has it been going on? The clock does most of the diagnosing. Heavy thumps at dusk and dawn — loud enough to make you look at the ceiling — usually means a possum. Scurrying after dark, especially with the sound of gnawing on timbers, points to rats. Light, fast scratching that seems to travel along the ceiling is classic mice.

Then the roof void confirms it. Our technicians go straight to two things: the droppings scattered through the insulation, which tell us the species and how busy the traffic is — and daylight. If light is leaking into a dark roof cavity, that’s an entry point, and it’s how we find the hole instead of guessing.

If it turns out to be a possum, that’s a different job under different rules — see our possum page. And if the scratching has recently stopped and a smell has started, see dead animal removal — we handle that too.

How they’re actually getting in

These are the entry points our techs find week in, week out across Melbourne homes:

• Under the kitchen sink — the holes cut for plumbing are almost never sealed up. It’s the single most common doorway we find.
• Under the oven — many kitchens have no kickboard beneath the oven, leaving an open run from the wall cavity straight into the kitchen.
• Roof tile gaps — small lifts and gaps at edges and valleys that a mouse walks through and a rat squeezes through.
• Subfloors and external wall plumbing — vents and pipe penetrations at ground level.
• Empty wall cavities — older weatherboard and brick-veneer homes have no insulation in the walls, so anything that gets under the house can climb the cavity like a ladder, straight up into the roof, without ever being seen.

Which is also the answer to the question we hear most: “but my house is clean — why me?” We’ve treated homes where people lived twenty and thirty years without a single issue, then copped an infestation out of nowhere. It’s the luck of the draw and the gaps in the building — not your housekeeping. Rats and mice don’t discriminate.

Why Melbourne’s autumn is rodent rush hour

Rats and mice breed at a rapid rate through the warmer months. When the cold arrives in March and April, that whole multiplied population starts looking for warmth — and the phones run hot. It’s our most chaotic time of year, every year.

The disaster calls are always the same story: the scratching got ignored for weeks. One job in Reservoir, the family had been away for three weeks — the mice had gone through the pantry, gnawed into the long-life milk (five or six litres gone), shredded the cardboard, demolished the chips, and by the time we arrived there were baby mice nesting in the pantry itself. Three weeks is all that took. The early callers get a small job; the wait-and-seers get that.

“Are they going to die in my roof?”

The question everyone asks, and here’s the straight answer. Our baiting approach is chosen and placed so rodents feed, then have time to head back to their nesting area — which is usually outside or underground — rather than dropping dead in your roof cavity. That’s a deliberate part of how we work, not luck. No honest company can promise it never happens; on the rare occasion one does die somewhere awkward, our dead animal removal service exists for exactly that — we don’t leave you with the smell.

It’s also half the problem with supermarket bait: the products aren’t as palatable as professional-grade baits, and many use older ingredients that rodent populations have built up resistance to. Our techs walk into homes where rats have chewed through packet after packet of DIY bait and kept right on breeding. You’re not baiting them at that point — you’re feeding them.