Sophomore Jenni Newbury had some unwelcome visitors in her room. Getting rid of them the easy way, however, only made things worse.
Earlier this year, Newbury and her roommate, who live in the Forbes Addition, were the victims of a stinkbug infestation. Stinkbugs are a particularly nagging problem because they emit a horrible stench if crushed.
“We find them in drawers, on ceilings, on our beds — pretty much everywhere,” she said. “My roommate once fell asleep on our futon and woke up with them crawling on her leg.”
Newbury said the bugs have flown into her hair when she is studying and became such a nuisance that it was an annoyance to enter the room at all.
Though stinkbugs are rare, pests in general are not an entirely atypical problem in University housing, some of which includes old buildings. This sometimes disrupts sleep or study, sometimes even forcing a room’s human inhabitants to evacuate.
Director of Facilities John Baer said in an e-mail that there are around 800 to 900 “requests for pest control services” for both administrative and residential buildings on campus every year.
The University contracts technicians from Western Pest Control to address pest issues. “When a call is received it is logged into the Facilities work order system and provided almost immediately,” Baer said. “The technician reports to the office several times per day to pick up any work orders and is contacted by cell phone for the most urgent requests.”
“In addition to responding to pest control issues, much of [the technicians’] time is spent preventing pests through baiting and monitoring,” Baer said.
The process for dealing with complaints can vary, Baer said. He noted that in addition to surveying the surrounding area, the technician will “repair … entry points for critters. This could include everything from repairing a screen, caulking a crack or crevice near a window, or repairing a hole in the building’s roof.”
Even so, some students still receive unexpected visits from a variety of unwelcome critters. Baer said, “In order of frequency, here are the types of requests we receive: mice, roaches, ants, bees, and squirrels. The [remaining] is a combination of birds, centipedes, spiders, silver fish, bats, and general ‘bugs’.”
A tale of a telling stink
Newbury and her roommate tried their best to deal with the problem.
“We thought that if we kept the light off in our room, they’d stop coming,” she said. “So we’ll go into our room, turn our lights on really fast, and then turn them off and run to bed.”
“It’s disturbing because you can’t go home. You lose that security of being in your room,” she added.
The bugs have still not disappeared, however, and because the bugs emit a horrible stench if crushed, Newbury and her roommate developed a system to deal with them by placing cups on top of the bugs until they die.
Newbury said she also found a bat fluttering around a stairwell in the Addition.
Baer said that rarely are there cases of continued pest problems. “There are few episodes when we would use the word ‘infestation,’ ” he said. “Almost all requests are due to one time occurrences — not infestations.”
The Forbes College Office did not respond to requests for comment.
Not quite Mickey
Late last Saturday night, a scream woke Vivian DeWoskin ’11.
“There is a rat in our room right now — either that or a really big mouse. And it just ran into the vent,” she heard her roommate shout. “What should I do?”
“Just come into the bedroom and close the door,” DeWoskin replied.
Cuyler Hall, where DeWoskin lives, is not the only place mice have found cozy homes on campus. The first floor of Witherspoon Hall is home not only to Nick Mora ’11 and his human neighbors but also to some small furry acquaintances.
“When I first saw the mouse, I kind of froze because I had just woken up from a nap,” Mora said. He added that though mice came and went occasionally, they never ate any food.
“I usually don’t notice it during the day,” he said. “It’s just when it’s quiet and I’m trying to sleep that I’ll hear the mouse moving around, and it just keeps me awake,” he said.
Mora’s hallmate Maribel Flores ’11, however, has had a few more problems.
“It was around February when I heard noises at night,” she said. “And then there was a box of granola bars on the shelf, and we took one of the granola bars out, and it had been chewed.”
When Flores finally saw the rodent culprit a few weeks later, “I screamed. I ran out of the room. It was not a pretty moment,” she said.
Flores found a hole on a ledge in the corner of her room. After she covered it, the mouse went away.
A group of girls at the end of Flores’ hall have also taken the problem into their own hands.
“We first started noticing mice around fall break,” Lauren Miller ’10 said. “Then we bought a couple of mousetraps ... and put [them] out.”
Miller and her roommates first started seeing signs of their infestation around Fall Break, when they found holes in food boxes and mouse droppings scattered around the room. They finally spotted the mouse during reading period.
“We screamed and jumped up on furniture,” Miller said.
Miller saw the mouse again as she was studying. She swept out her hand to startle the mouse and then watched to see where it ran to make its escape.
“Instead of running into a cabinet or behind a desk, he ran into our bedroom,” Miller said. “That was really scary, and I almost didn’t sleep in our bed that night.”
But Miller said that she and her roommates have grown accustomed to their mouse. They have named it “Snuffleupagus.”
Mora and his roommate Scott Huang ’11 refer to their problem as “Scotty Jr.”
“Mice sightings are much more common during cold weather months and in buildings adjacent to construction activity,” Baer said.
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