One-way exclusion doors are doors that are placed on holes that are being used by wild Colorado animals to enter and exit places you don't want them to be, like your walls, your roof or attic and underneath your house or deck. The whole idea of the door is at the animal leaves normally but then cannot get back in using that hole because the one-way exclusion door also acts as a barrier when the animal tries to return, the most common animals one way exclusion doors are used for are squirrels. They can also be used for larger animals like raccoons and possums.



There are whole host of websites that have plans for make it yourself one way exclusion doors, and nearly all of the ones I have seen will work if made to specifications. The downside to this of course is that if you are either not handy or if you make a mistake when constructing your one way exclusion door then there is a good chance that's the animals will either be able to get back in through the door or that they will be stuck inside what you are trying to get them out of. The worst possible scenario is that they are stuck inside, especially if it is inside your roof or attic because once they realize they are trapped they will go berserk, it is rodents like Pueblo squirrels, they will frantically chew anything including wood, electrical wires and even the drywall into your house and then if they still don't get out they would die and decompose making horrible stink in the process.

Do not use a one-way exclusion door on a mother with babies, the amount of damage a mother can do when trying to get back to her babies you would not believe, I have seen photos of damage done by Pueblo raccoons where almost whole sheets of house siding have been ripped off and also the female may actually get inside the living area of the house and totally wreck it in her attempts to get to her babies. Either trapping or excluding females with young should only be done once the young are old enough to follow mother on her foraging trips, that way you exclude the whole lot and not just the female making her desperate to get back in.

If you are a little bit handy you can make your own one-way exclusion door, all you need is a relatively small piece of mesh, as little as one foot long, you need to roll the mesh into a funnel with the big end a little bigger than the exit hole the Colorado animal is using. You now need to attach the big end to the wall where the exit hole is, this can be done numerous ways which you probably already know. The small end is where the animal will exit, this ends needs to be able to expand as animal pushes through it, once through that end it will go back to its original shape which is too small a hole for the animal to get back in, also if you leave some of the wire bare it will stick into the animal as it tries to find a way back in and help prevent it attacking your homemade door.

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