Rat poison in the attic looks like the fastest fix available: no traps to check, no crawling through insulation, just a set of bait stations and a wait.

You hear it first, usually after the house goes quiet. A scratch, then a pause, then a faster scramble along the joist above the guest room ceiling.

You finally found it: a gap where the soffit meets the fascia, chewed wider at the edges, with a dark smear of grease along the wood where something has been squeezing through for weeks.

Scratching in the ceiling at eleven at night doesn't tell you much by itself. Is it moving along a truss above the guest room, or working the perimeter under the house near a downspout?

The house is dark, the room is quiet, and then it starts. A scratch directly overhead, a short scurry, a pause, then a soft rolling drag along the top of the ceiling.

Two lines run across an attached townhome row, and they do not sit on top of each other.

Nineteen days is the figure that travels. It turns up in pest-control copy, in home-maintenance articles, and in the line people repeat to each other: house mice breed every nineteen days.

The report lands in an inbox after the inspection and gets opened on a phone at the kitchen counter.

Ask where a roof rat got into an attic and the answer is rarely a hole punched through something solid.

It starts again around midnight. A scratch, then a scurry, then that hollow rolling sound of something moving along the top of the ceiling above your bed. The exterminator came weeks ago, set traps, maybe left bait, and told you it was handled. For a while, it was quiet. Now you are lying awake listening to the same tenant move back into the same space, and you are wondering what you paid for.

Nesting material pressed against an air handler, or gnaw marks along a supply boot, is usually seen first by whoever is servicing that equipment, since the area immediately around the unit gets looked at as part of the service and rarely otherwise.

On a single block in Coral Springs or Parkland, one row of houses backs onto open water and the row facing it does not.

Once the noise overhead has been identified as coming from rats rather than squirrels or raccoons, the question changes.

A technician who walks the outside of a house before opening the front door is not counting palms.

A canal bank holds water at one edge and packed earth at the other, and that boundary is where a Norway rat's day starts, well before any nearby house comes into the picture.

Ask how many attics a house has, and the answer is usually one. Under an articulated estate roofline, it is often several, and that is a difference in kind rather than a difference in size.

You are holding two scopes of work for rodent proofing on the same house, both from licensed companies, both using the same word.

A rat traveling the same joist or roofline gap night after night is not moving carelessly.

Two calls came in the same week, both for scratching in the attic after dark.

A tarp goes up over the section that failed, fastened down at its edges, and from that moment until a permanent repair is scheduled and finished, that sheet is the roof over that part of the house.