More Wild Wildlife Calls from a Pest Pro

Pest Pros wildlife specialist Josh Hodge returns to PEST PROSpectives with more true field stories about bats, raccoons, and foxes that turn attics, chimneys, and crawl spaces into wildlife shelters. 

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Episode Resources
Pest Pros of Michigan

PEST PROSpectives is a Livemic Communications production.

Transcript

Welcome And Josh Returns

Richard Piet 0:08

I'm Richard Piet. Welcome back to Pest Prospectives, the official podcast from the Pest Pros of Michigan. You know, a little while ago we talked with Josh Hodge, a wildlife specialist at Pest Pros of Michigan, about some of the wilder stories he has out in the wild. And he's back today with more of those. Hi, Josh. Hey. Thanks for the chance to catch up again. You know, one of the things, and we have talked about them in our episode, so subscribe, look for these episodes. They're really interesting. We get we get together with the aces at Pest Pros and talk about uh behavior of animals and

Bat Exclusion And Entry Points

Richard Piet 0:50

insects. One of them was bats. You have to have encountered bats in your travels, is that so? I mean, we love bats.

Josh Hodge 0:58

Uh a little tongue-in-cheek there, but bats are a big part of our revenue because they get into addicts and people don't like to share the house with bats, uh, which is understandable. Yeah.

Richard Piet 1:10

So when you've encountered them, how do you handle it? And are there any challenges that you've encountered with them? Yeah.

Josh Hodge 1:19

I mean, there's pretty much one way to deal with bats in a structure, and that is you have to figure out how they're getting in and identify those entry points and also possible entry points because bats have this infuriating thing they do. They imprint on the structure, they don't want to leave. So if you take away this entry point and there's another one over here, you're just moving them around. They're gonna go over there. So it's pretty much all or nothing with bats, usually. They will spend the uh the we're mainly dealing with big brown bats. There's a smattering of other ones, they'll spend the day in the house during the summer, and then they'll spend the whole winter in the house, usually. Oh boy.

Richard Piet 1:56

So when you get a call about them, and I'm sure you have, how have you handled them and have you had any wild encounters with them?

Josh Hodge 2:05

Yeah. I mean, usually it's a pretty straightforward process. We're just showing up, confirming, yeah, there is bat activity, and then we provide a plan. Here's what we can do, here's how we get the bats out of the house. And we're pretty we're very successful at that. That doesn't mean there isn't sometimes a warranty call because bats are a formidable enemy when it comes to finding gaps in a house. But anyway, yeah, I've been in attics where there's like a lot of bats flying around and you're like you're ducking. Like, are these gonna hit me? You know, are they gonna get on? I haven't had that happen. They're they're flying, they're really good at. Uh, it's the walking where they land and like crab walk with their arms that they're a little more clumsy.

The Bucket Release Bat Story

Josh Hodge 2:44

But one time, uh I was in an attic early on in my career, and the homeowner was talking to me, and he's like, Did you see any bats? And I'm like, Yeah, there's like 30 of them clumped together on the wall. And he's like, Oh my, can you remove them? And I talked to my manager, he's like, Yeah, I I guess you can. So I put him, I took a bucket and I like snuck up to them. I like put them in the bucket. I like put the bucket over them, and then I think I gently slid something behind them so they fell into the bucket without injuring them. And I didn't know what to do with them. So I lived, you know, a ways away, and I lived in the city, and it was on a hill on an intersection. There were some trees, and there's like a clearing where the intersection is, and I get home and I'm like, what am I gonna do with these bats? I have to let them go. So I kind of just went out on the hill in my front yard and got tipped them out of the bucket, and they kind of like start taking off off of the hill, and then they start to form this traffic pattern in the like over the intersection at about like 20 feet up or something. There's about 30 bats flying a circular pattern, and it looked like something out of a movie, just like a like a circle of bats over the intersection. I was like, Whoa, holy crap, it wasn't me! Like, is anybody looking? Kind of but it was kind of like Alfred Hitchcock kind of thing, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Piet 4:07

So uh their habit is not necessarily to fly away, but to survey their area, kind of get their bearings. That's what that sounds like.

Josh Hodge 4:19

Yeah, I if I remove a bat from a structure, if you do an on-site release, the bat will fly around, try to figure out where it is, and you'll see it actually figure out I there's been a couple times where I saw it figure out, oh, okay, and it actually goes back to the entry point and showed me where the entry point was. That happened once or twice. Obviously, like that's not ideal to have it go back in the house, but we're looking to fix that anyway.

Richard Piet 4:44

So, yeah, so that they helped you figure it out. Wow. All right.

Raccoons In Attics And Baby Season

Richard Piet 4:50

Uh, we know certainly that bats can be a challenge, so can raccoons. They get into attics too, don't they?

Josh Hodge 4:57

Oh, yeah. Especially this time of year, we're we're gonna be coming into a time when they're really I mean, they've already been in the attic because of the winter, but now we're gonna be coming into baby season in the spring, and they love to raise the babies in the attic. So that's always fun.

Richard Piet 5:12

Yeah, a protective space. Uh again, the uh the motherly instincts, they want to make sure that it's it's safe. They're pretty crafty too. I've seen some video with raccoons. Uh they get into chimneys and things and they climb. They're uh pretty agile despite how you might think they look. Yep. Uh they're pretty good, aren't they?

Josh Hodge 5:34

Yeah, so chimney flues are sized perfectly for a raccoon to brace their back against one wall and their feet against the other all wall, and they go up and down with ease. So to them, a chimney is an extra deluxe hollow tree, basically.

Richard Piet 5:50

Got lots of nice space in there, really warm at the bottom, too. Have you had challenges getting them out?

Josh Hodge 5:58

Yeah, I've had some years, especially early in my career, we had so many raccoon baby calls, and you find yourself crawling through framing, like getting into the tightest spots in attics, just hoping you can reach them. Because the mom almost never puts the babies where you could actually access them easily. But raccoons are funny, they'll often be in the attic at the same time you are when you're doing an inspection, and usually they hide, and you'll see a little bit of hair peeking out of the soft or something. But one time I had a raccoon had just crawled under some insulation, and I was standing there looking down, and his tail is still hanging right out, and he just didn't realize his tail was hanging out. I'm like, okay, I see you there, buddy. But pest control operators always want to do the like the cowboy thing, and I mean it's not recommended, but you want to like catch it, you know, like use your catch pole, your bike gloves, your your grabber stick, and like catch it right there. And that's a good way to fall out, fall through an attic ceiling or make a mess. But it's it's rare you actually get that chance. Like, I don't think I've actually caught one in an attic, and I've known better than to go too far trying. They can get aggressive, right? You definitely don't want to handle them. And when you get a big raccoon on the end of a catch pole, which is a the ones we use are a metal pole with a rubber-coated cable that runs through them and has a loop at the end, and it has a locking mechanism. So you can cinch it down, and usually you want to do that around the body so you're not choking them out, and you can catch them long enough to place them in a trap. But when you get a big raccoon on a catchpole, you definitely know you have something like you know, they talk about chimpanzees have like a for their size, have like a seven times strength advantage over a human, you know, per pound. Yeah. I don't know if it's like that ratio for a raccoon, but for their size, they're really strong. So like it's not easy to control

When Sealing Traps A Raccoon

Josh Hodge 7:58

a big raccoon on a catchpole. Also, you want to take precautions when you're sealing up the house that they're actually out of the house. One of the better raccoon stories isn't isn't mine. It's uh my mentors, another guy named Josh, who taught me when I first came into wildlife work. This was probably a learning experience for him too. He was pretty sure the raccoons were out, and he said, I'm just gonna seal up this entry point. And he did a good job sealing it up because there was one raccoon left and it couldn't get out. So the next thing the raccoon did is it went down in the wall cavity between two studs and between the drywall. And this was it ended up in somebody's kitchen wall, and it went down as far as it could, and then it encountered an electrical wire and it bit the wire.

Richard Piet 8:47

See where this is going.

Josh Hodge 8:48

Yeah, it it didn't kill the raccoon, but it it also didn't like being shocked. So the raccoon was in the wall screeching and it got shocked. And long story short, my mentor had to go back, cut the wall open. And I've seen the pictures when you've made the first cut, the raccoon's head comes out of the hole, and it's like, thank God. I don't even think it was that mad when he like captured it because it was just so happy to be out of the wall.

Richard Piet 9:16

Yeah, and an impromptu decision to run and then no exit out of the attic ends up down in the wall. Yep. Uh even more scary situation. Yeah, they have to go somewhere. That's incredible.

Fox Digging And Better Barriers

Richard Piet 9:32

You've also dealt with foxes, have you not? I see them occasionally on my uh doorbell camera in the middle of the night. You know, you wake up in the morning, you see, oh, motion at the front door, you look, and at two in the morning, there was a fox going by. Yeah. Uh they're beautiful.

Josh Hodge 9:50

I'm not a canine expert. I'm not going to claim that. Trapping canines is something you have to actually be good at. But I've dealt with some exclusion relating to foxes, which means like seal work, like trying to keep them out from under a building. You think of a groundhog as a tunneling animal, a fox is on a different level. We have a product that we were using installing around buildings about 14 inches, and it gets driven into the ground, and it's to keep burrowing animals from going under the building. So we quoted that. We thought, okay, this will be this'll be good. And a guy did the installation, it wasn't me, but there's a warranty call, and I was available, so I get called out. And the fox had just completely disrespected that product. Like, not only did it dig under the product, but it like dug down twice the depth. There's a big mound of dirt. The fox was like, I'm gonna keep living here. And I ended up, I ended up using a one-way door for the fox and just kicking it out. But I had to trench out a fair, like, I think I ended up trenching out like several feet from the building and installing, I don't recall exactly how I trenched out. It might have been more down than out, but anyway, I installed mesh in the ground and I brought it out farther because the fox had demonstrated it could dig really deep. So I brought the mesh out so he would be standing on it when he started digging. But uh, yeah, anyway, they are very impressive at digging. Also, we were finding like uh groundhog carcasses and stuff. And you think of a fox as not that big of an animal, but you know, like a smaller groundhog is fair game for them. They're they're really nimble and able to take on some stuff that's bigger than you think they would.

Richard Piet 11:28

Wow. And uh obviously, this is an example of some of the work that you do, which is not just a come over for half an hour and take care of a situation, digging a trench and installing mesh. This is this is

Long-Term Fixes Over Quick Traps

Richard Piet 11:43

big work.

Josh Hodge 11:43

Yeah, you know, uh, we've really gotten into the mindset of we're looking for that solution to the problem, not a band-aid. So let's say I show up with a trap, you've got an animal problem, I trap the animal, I take it away, but there's an underlying cause of that problem, the animals burrowing under your structure, the animals getting into your structure. If that's not addressed, you're gonna quickly have another issue. And if there has been activity, that increases the likelihood there will be more activity because now you've got those pheromones and smells there, and that's a neon sign. Hey, vacancy, vacancy. So when we show up, we're looking not how do we just do a quick fix? How do we make it so this doesn't happen anymore?

Richard Piet 12:27

How do we disconnect the vacancy signs? Yep. That's what you're talking about. Oh, yeah. This is really interesting. Bats, raccoons, foxes, maybe other things. This is what the pest pros of Michigan are dealing with.

Wrap-Up And Subscribe Prompt

Richard Piet 12:42

And as you can hear from Josh, sometimes these are uh somewhat complicated solutions, but they're looking for them, and they provide them. So if you have a question about wildlife in your area, challenges with them maybe in the past, Josh and the team at Pest Bros can address that for you. By the way, we have a lot of these episodes, including one other one with Josh about wild stories. Thank you for uh the updates. Find them, subscribe to Pest Prospectives and hear those. And Josh will be back with us in the future with more Stories from the Wild on Pest Perspectives.

Josh Hodge 13:22

Thank you, Richard.