Best practices for nuisance wildlife control operators in New York State

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Ch 5: Step four: Prevent future problems

Monitoring

Here's a strategy that has a key role in modern agricultural pest management, which might be very useful for NWCOs, especially those who service apartment complexes, large properties, or have corporate accounts. It may give you the chance to use your knowledge to promote a better approach to wildlife damage management. This can be good for your customers, for wildlife, and for your bottom line, all at the same time.

Monitoring refers to the routine inspection of a site to evaluate its current condition and look for vulnerabilities that could lead to wildlife conflicts later on. You gather the information your customer needs to make better decisions, then offer advice. Monitoring often helps people save money because you catch a problem when it's small and easier to manage, or better yet, you prevent it from happening altogether.

In agriculture, pests aren't controlled until monitoring reveals that their activity has reached a certain level—above the threshold, the point at which it pays to deal with the situation. In some cases, thresholds are very precise: "four flies on each leg of the cow counted during a ten-minute period," for example.

So how does this apply to nuisance wildlife control? Your customers are probably most concerned about three things: health and safety; economic damage; and quality of life issues. How bad does a nuisance wildlife situation have to be in order to justify control? You may be able to sit down with your customer and establish your own guidelines. Your customer might be willing to tolerate woodpeckers banging on a metal gutter but not squirrels in the attic, for example.

Or maybe you just skip the idea of thresholds altogether because your customer doesn't want any wildlife damage at all. Instead, you just agree on an inspection schedule. Your goal is to prevent problems. After a very thorough initial inspection, maybe you go out once a month. Homeowners might be willing to pay for an annual inspection.

Since monitoring isn't widely used in nuisance wildlife control work, you may need to explain the idea to convince your customers that this is a best practice. Pictures showing actual wildlife damage can help people understand the economic risks. Let them know how much the repairs cost for each of those situations. Compare that to the cost of an inspection. The best way to solve a wildlife conflict is to prevent it. Monitoring might be a way to achieve that goal.

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