Wildlife Trapping
When it comes to pest control, wildlife can often present a tricky situation. Not only do some animals require professional handling and understanding due to their potentially dangerous behavior, but the presence of any animal in your home can create an unwanted disruption in your lifestyle. Fortunately, some professionals have the experience and proper tools to safely and humanely remove any wildlife infestations you may encounter. In this blog post, we’ll offer some tips on how best to handle wildlife pest control services so that you can get rid of pests while also protecting yourself, your family members or pets, and the affected animal(s).
Trey's Wildlife Trapping, based out of Kirkland, WA, has been helping Western Washington homeowners and businesses get rid of beavers, mink, bobcats, and other wildlife for over 25 years.
When you need skills, ingenuity, and professionalism...Trey's mastery of trapping skills, the fact that he uses the latest equipment, and his practiced ingenuity can take a property management crisis (and at times, a public relations crisis) and resolve it to everyone's highest satisfaction.
Owner Trey Shelton knows that a wild animal problem can become very urgent. He is available 24/7 to properly trap, manage, control and remove beavers, mountain beavers, bobcats, river otters, mink, and muskrats.
Trey's Wildlife Control provides professional support for
- Properly identifying which type of wild animal you are dealing with, whether it be beaver, mountain beaver, muskrat, mink, river otters, bobcat or bats.
- Trapping and removing wildlifeeffectively and in accordance with all legal and environmental requirements.
- Exploring larger properties and finding hidden burrows, lodges and dens.
- Answering emergency situations at all hours
As a registered contractor with Washington State (PESTCN*024L6), Trey's Wildlife Control is fully qualified to repair any damage or contamination to any part of your home, including your crawl space, attic, or basement.
Beavers
- Beavers, with their dark brown fur and flat tails, are found in areas with year-round water flow.
- Trapping is advisable as a means to keep populations in check and to reduce the possibility of property damage.
- Trapping, controlling, and managing beaver populations on a property can be an art as well as a science. Trey has the years of experience necessary to be effective.
Mountain Beavers
- The mountain beaver is about young opossum size, with blackish-brown fur and a stubby tail. Their vision is poor, and they will walk right by you if you don't move.
- It's not really a beaver and it doesn't always live in the mountains! But once it invades your landscape, it's for sure you'll want it gone.
- In the coastal northwest, they prefer to dig tunnel homes (six to eight inches in diameter) in sandy hillsides or forested areas with lots of tree and leaf debris on the ground to increase their safety. It's not uncommon to see as many as 10 or more burrow entrances belonging to a single burrow system.
- Forest undergrowth normally provides all they need to eat, which includes ferns, ivy, Oregon grape, salmonberry and huckleberry, vine maples, underground tree roots, tree seedlings, and salal among other plants. However, residential landscape plantings are also very attractive to them as well, especially rhododendron, azalea and a long list of juicy greens like dahlias, peonies, and gladiolas. You will find plants cut off at ground level and simply missing from your yard. Rhodes will have the ends of individual branches cut off and missing.
- Fencing is sometimes employed to keep them out, but in most cases is not an appropriate solution due to practicality, cost or aesthetics. Trey can effectively remove them by trapping, followed by caving in burrow entrances to allow for future monitoring.
- As their offspring begin to reach maturity, they leave the parent colony and will establish a new burrow system elsewhere, or re-inhabit an old system if available. So it pays to keep an eye on old burrow systems on your property, to confirm any new arrivals as soon as possible before they do damage to your plants.
- The presence of burrow systems on or near your property can pose another problem as well since rats and mice will often cohabit with mountain beaver. The nearness of higher rodent populations could bring greater pressure to feed near your house, or eventually gain entrance to it.
- The presence of burrows on steeper slopes can lead to serious surface soil destabilization and the loosening of tree root systems.
Beaver needs to be managed quickly before they cause extensive damage.
Muskrats
- These medium-sized rodents are semi-aquatic, preferring to spend most of their time in the water. The fur color varies but is generally dark brown.
- They can be found in virtually any body of water in Washington, and their population growth can be dramatic with 15 - 20 young born per year per female on average. Historically, from 1991 to 2000, trappers harvested an annual average of 6,189 muskrats per year. The passing of Initiative 713 in 2000 (restricting trapping options) has to lead to uncontrolled muskrat population growth, with proportionate increases in property damage.
- Muskrats live in bank dens or lodges similar to beaver. Diets are primarily aquatic plants like cattails, sedges, bulrush, arrowhead, water lilies, and pondweed. They will also feed on freshwater mussels, crawfish, turtles, frogs, and fish if available. Crops like rice, corn, soybeans, and wheat are also on the menu when close to water habitats.
- They are active year-round and can become a formidable attacker in their own defense.
- The principal problem caused by muskrats is damage caused by burrowing activity. And to make matters worse, burrowing can progress unnoticed until consequential and costly damage has already occurred.
- Man-made embankments of all types are especially vulnerable to safety issues and property damage losses; i.e. levies, dikes, fish pond dams, golf course pond banks, stormwater retention facilities, shoreline-home retaining walls, floating styrofoam marinas, docks, and boathouses. Ornamental pond owners have had muskrats chew through expensive pond liners, and even eat the resident koi. Large boats at anchor overnight sometimes find muskrats lodged in their exhaust pipes.
- Trey's trapping expertise can protect your property from muskrat damage, and he can advise on installing protective measures. Call Trey to remove, control and get rid of threats posed by muskrats.
Trey can trap muskrats and provide guidance on effective protective measures.
Mink
- These animals are semi-aquatic with a 2 foot long, sleek body and 8-inch tail. The color of their fur ranges from chocolate brown to black with a white to yellowish patch on the chin and throat.
- Since food sources come equally from land and water, mink are often found in forested areas with a nearby water source of any type. Favorite foods include rodents, fish, frogs, crawfish, rabbits, muskrats, birds and eggs, salamanders, earthworms and tadpoles. And they do love chicken and ducks! They are great swimmers and deep divers.
- Mink are very territorial, depositing a strong musk scent to mark home areas, and are willing to fight any fellow mink intruders.
- Human conflicts mainly occur when mink prey upon penned birds of any kind, koi and goldfish kept in ornamental ponds, fish at hatchery rearing facilities, or nesting waterfowl and upland game bird young. In such cases, mink are especially effective predators since the prey is more vulnerable and much easier to catch compared to prey in more open surroundings.
- Mink can invade an ornamental pond, capture a fish and be gone without a trace except for a scale or two left behind. Raccoons, on the other hand, tend to leave surroundings a bit torn up in their wake.
- The culprit(s) will either be an individual or from Spring to Fall, possibly a female with her young of the year. Mink predation may be confirmed by the killing technique of biting the back of the head or neck, often leaving visible puncture marks
- Also, mink sometimes kill more than they can eat and may leave birds neatly placed in a pile.
- Mink can be infected with transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME), which may possibly be transferred to cattle and sheep. This neurodegenerative disease is similar to mad cow disease (BSE) in cattle and scrapies in sheep.
- Having Trey remove the offender(s) and implementing security measures usually solves the problem for man-made facilities. Open field game bird nesting predation requires removal of enough mink to allow acceptable rearing levels and/or large scale habitat modifications.
Mink are beautiful and intelligent: Trey can help you manage them.
Bobcats
- Bobcats are found throughout Washington and are increasingly adapting to suburban areas. Secretive, shy, solitary, and rarely seen in the wild, their movements tend to be slower and more deliberate, while preferring to move within the vegetative cover or adjacent to it.
- The home range for bobcats in Western Washington is two and one half to six square miles for adult males, and they commonly travel up to 4 miles a day, marking their territorial boundaries with scent and using trees as scratching posts.
- Wild prey includes rodents, rabbits, squirrels, fawns, mountain beaver, and birds. Domestic lambs, goats, young pigs, house cats, small dogs and especially poultry are fair game to bobcats.
- When trying to identify if an animal was killed by a bobcat, it's helpful to know that a bobcat will eat the abdomen first, along with the neck, shoulders, and hindquarters. They typically kill by biting the throat, neck or skull of the prey animal. Scratch marks may be left on the victim. When the prey is smaller, however, it may be totally devoured on the spot.
- In typical cat fashion, bobcats cover the remains of large kills with surrounding debris while coyotes do not do this. Also, bobcats leave sharp-edged cuts in muscle tissue while coyotes leave ragged, torn edges when they feed.
- Although not often a problem predator, after once feeding on domestic animals, bobcats tend to repeat this behavior since these targets are more numerous and not nearly as elusive as wild prey.
- Trey recommends a combination of trapping and effective security measures to increase domestic animal safety. If humans don't give bobcats a taste of the "good life", they can usually comfortably coexist with us and afford us a beautiful, fleeting glimpse every now and then.
Trey has vast experience dealing with bobcats
River Otter
- Northwest River Otter tend to be dark brown with lighter faces, throats, and bellies. Weighing 20 - 30 pounds and up to five feet long, river otters are sleek, muscle-bound torpedoes.
- River otter may be present in many types of freshwater bodies, and even in coastal saltwater. Reliable food supply is key. They are primarily an aquatic animal, but are very comfortable on land as well, and can easily travel long distances.
- River otter primarily feed on fish and crawfish, with shellfish, reptiles, amphibians, aquatic insects, birds, muskrats, and young beavers on the menu. They can consume over three pounds of fish a day, usually eating small fish in the water and bringing larger fish to shore before feeding on them.
- Their feeding circuit takes one to four weeks to complete, depending on prey availability along the way. Solitary males can travel much further than family groups before returning again.
- Their sense of smell is so acute, they can detect fish pond odors far downstream of the water outlet source.
- River otters will select birthing sites up to 1/2 mile away from water, sometimes under houses and decks, in boathouses and other human structures. In the animal world, denning sites are coveted and reused year after year if possible. In order to break the cycle, trapping and securing the site are often necessary and effective.
- Fish ponds and hatchery facilities draw otters like a magnet. Trapping and improved exclusion measures are usually the solutions of choice.
- The otter's propensity to play, along with loafing and defecating on floating objects, creates undesirable and often very expensive problems in boat houses, aboard boats, on docks, and at marina facilities. Exclusion is often not practical in many situations, so removal by trapping is the most practical option.
Call Trey's Wildlife Trapping today to remove pesky river otters!
Want to learn more about how Trey can help solve your wildlife trapping problems?
Contact Pest Control Northwest today - we can help you remove any of these : Beaver, Mountain Beaver, Mink, River Otter, Bob Cat and Muskrat