Best practices for nuisance wildlife control operators in New York State

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CH 5: Step three: Do it

Avoid creating wildlife orphans

Foxes often calm down once they're restrained with a catchpole. Since this healthy fox had accidentally wandered in, it was released on site.

Before you repel, remove, exclude, or kill an animal, take steps to prevent the orphaning of young wildlife. A lot of NWCO work happens when wildlife are raising their young, so this is an important consideration. Sounds pretty reasonable. How do you do it?

Unfortunately, this is another hotly debated topic that hasn't been well-studied. For raccoons and squirrels, there's some anecdotal information tracking the number of times a female will retrieve her young when certain removal techniques are used, but to our knowledge, no one has followed that all the way through to find out what happens later. How often does the female find a suitable den site in time? How easily does the family recover from the stress of the experience? Do a reasonable number of the young survive to adulthood?

Many people assume that den and nesting sites are plentiful and that females usually have several "up their sleeves." Perhaps this is true for some species, in some areas. It's certainly not true in all places.

The best way to prevent orphaning is to convince your customers to wait until the young are mobile before removing, repelling, or excluding the family from the site. If that's unacceptable, you can try to capture and remove both the female and all of her young and hope that she will retrieve them and continue to care for them.

When is this most likely to work? Let's apply a little biological common sense. Older, more experienced females are probably better at finding resources than younger females. As the young age, they bond more closely with their mother, so she'd be less likely to abandon them. You can't change the ages of the animals you're dealing with, but if you think your chances of success are poor, you might choose a different option.

Some NWCOs are trying to refine removal techniques to increase the chances that the female will retrieve her young. Here are their suggestions.

• Time your activities to match the normal habits of that species. The sooner the female finds the young, the better. If they're left alone too long, they may die of exposure. For a nocturnal species, start at dusk.
   
• Remove the female, preferably using a direct capture technique such as a catchpole (described later).
   
• Place the female and young in a release box. (We'll describe several variations on this theme.) Many NWCOs use a simple cardboard box, others use a wooden nest box, such as a wood duck box, and some prefer plastic boxes.
  
  Match the size of the box and its entrance hole to the size of the species, using a smaller box with a smaller hole for squirrels, and a larger box with at least a 7" hole for raccoons. (One NWCO recommends a 2 × 2 × 1 ft. box.)
  
  Make sure the animal cannot immediately get out of the box by covering the hole. Then move them to a quiet place outdoors. Unless they're likely to be disturbed, keep the box at ground level. Remove the cover so the female can get out of the box. Another option is to build a box with a sliding door. Leave the door open about an inch, to keep the heat inside but make it easy for the female to slide it fully open so she can retrieve her young.
  
  Some NWCOs prefer to use heated release boxes when it's cold outside. Make sure that the box doesn't get too hot. You may want to provide heat in just one area. Also, assume that if you put something in the box, they will chew on it. Don't give them access to anything that they shouldn't eat, such as wires. That means that if you choose to use a household heating pad as the heat source, make sure the animals can't reach the wires. To avoid that problem, one NWCO builds his boxes with a double floor, placing the heating pad in the space between the floors. Other options for heat sources include microwaveable heating pads and warm soapstones.
   
• If you can't catch the female, put the young in the release box and locate it as close to the entry site as possible.
   
• Learn the typical birthing and rearing seasons of the species you handle. Know how to tell when a female is nursing and what young sound like.

How will you evict the animals? The next section is an overview of the common techniques available to NWCOs.

Next Section (Direct capture)