Can you ID this uninvited house guest?

[kkirk82]

I live in Spring and these Rio Grande frogs have pushed me to a point of no return - I haven't slept well in months!!!! Months!!!!!
It's definitely that damn frog -- there are several of them and they CHIRP LOUDLY ALL NIGHT LONG! I got a loud fan, some very heavy and layered curtains that are said to help keep out outside noises-- I have ear plugs and lately have had to keep the stupid TV on all night to prevent from hearing them over the A/C and fan and through the plugs and curtains!!!!! I can't take it!!!!!!!
How the heck do I get rid of them????

[JeffinNYC]

I live in Dallas, not Houston, but we also hear chirps all night from both Mediterranean Geckos and Rio Grande Chirping Frogs. If you can discern a distinct geck-go or geck-geck-go, that’s probably a gecko. If it sounds like a tennis-shoe squeak on a basketball court, that’s more likely to be a Rio Grande frog. Both sound really similar, though, and their calls can vary somewhat along with the outside temperatures. They can be loud, but they’re quieter than some of the tree frogs around, and I like to hear them, especially compared to the sounds of loud motorcycles, barking dogs, and teenagers’ car stereos.

[bu2]

Sounds like a bird. But it could also be a squirrel. Squirrels are worse in your attic than rats. They chew on everything. So for anyone with similar noises (8 years later), get rid of squirrels quickly!

[Plz12229]

Whatever it is, it’s probably harmless although a nuisance. Anyone had any weird things in there attic? I’m pretty sure mine will “outweird” yours. I had a skunk in mine several years ago.

[Space City Native]

I'll tell you a funny story. I moved into a rent house in Sharpstown in 1995, in the late spring. Not very long after I moved in, I noticed the air conditioning wasn't working too well. The owner sent an ac repairman out-he checked the ac system and said it was working fine. So he looked up in the attic and discoverd that something had chewed the ac ductwork all to smithereens. So, the reason my house wasn't too cool was that I was air conditioning my attic....

The owners were kind of yuppie types that didn't want to spend much time messing with things, so they called in some 'experts'. They called some folks to replace the ductwork, and also some pest control 'experts'. They aksed me some questions to determine what kind of varmints might be in my attic (it was a very shallow attic so it was hard to move around in there and see what was going on). They diligently inquired as to when I might here some scratching or scurrying around, and I told them I usually heard this during the day (I did hear some squeaking or chirping, too). The 'experts' assured me that mice weren't awake during the day, so the culprits had to be squirrels.

Ok. So the pest control folks put some screens over the soffit vents and said that should solve the problem, as it would prevent the squirrels from coming in. Sure.

I was a student at UH at the time, and I was sitting on my lawn chair in the back yard in the middle of the day one day studying when, lo and behold, a mouse scurries across the back yard, squeezes its little self in between this small space between the foundation of the house and the bottom of the shingles on the side of the house and disappears (I thought mice were asleep during the day, haha).

Anyway, the 'experts' returned and told me, "Sir", (I loved how they always called me 'sir') "we're going to put some cages up in the attic to trap the mice,and there shouldn't be a problem with them before too long...".

Sure. Squeak, chirp, scurry, scratch, just like before. Finally, the owner got a little frustrated with the experts and came over and threw some good old fashioned rat poison up in the attic.

In pretty short order, I knew the mice were dead because the whole house became filled with this overwhelming stench of rotting flesh that took about a month to go away-I had to keep the windows open as much as possible in order to survive living there. If it was any consolation, one of my friends, who happened to be the county medical examiner told me that putrefactive bacteria wouldn't make me sick, it woud just make the house smell bad. The owner even crawled around in the attic to see if he could find their little carcasses but it was so dark in there and there was so little room to move that he couldn't see anything, so I just had to tough it out. That was, however, the end of the mice.

Anyway, don't be a wimp! Crawl around up there and see if you can figure out what kind of varmint is invading your domicile! If some big monster eats you, we'll all come to your funeral and I'll marry your widow

[Ghost Town]

Rio Grande frogs don't really bother me.
Actually I found out about their existence only from this thread. Yes I noticed their presence in my backyard too. Today I saw very tiny frog making fairly loud voice, that you normally wouldn't expect from such a small creature.
But what bothered me throughout the summer - some bugs that make super loud industrial type of noise, like a constantly running compressor or something. Much louder than Rio Grande frogs. This noise stopped just recently with the rains. Who knows what the source could be? It was pretty much constant noise all day long, quite irritating.