Tag Archives: michigan wildlife

Rabbit Control & Prevention

Learn how to keep the neighborhood rabbit out of your garden this spring with these tips.

Why We Keep Rabbits Out

Anyone who tills soil regards the rabbit as more than a cute addition to the carrot patch. This long-eared mammal possesses a voracious appetite for various fresh vegetation— perennials, annuals, woody plants, vegetables, and fruit. The menu of rabbit favorites is so ridiculously long it’s easier to list the foods they don’t enjoy.

As if that isn’t enough, rabbits also reproduce at excessively high rates, hence the phrase “multiplying like rabbits”. This is why allowing them to hang around may quickly become a total garden infestation and destruction. Their numbers skyrocket at three litters of six babies each per year in the north and up to as many as six litters of three babies each year in the south. In the north, the first litter appears in March but is year-round elsewhere. Their gestation period is a mere 29 days.

Your backyard bunny’s main concern is to eat without being eaten, which is a difficult task given that more than two dozen predatory species relish rabbits. Because of this, nibbling your marigolds is not a carefree picnic but, in fact, a potentially life-threatening mission. However, if the neighborhood Peter Cottontail can squeeze through a hole in your garden fence, it will be able to munch safely.

How to Prevent Rabbits

The most effective way to keep rabbits out of the garden is to start using the plants they don’t like early in the spring and then be consistent throughout the growing season.

First and foremost, it’s best to keep rabbits from crossing into the garden, to begin with. Many historical remedies rely on spreading various substances around the garden’s perimeter, i.e., human hair, dried blood, or dried blood meal. If you sprinkle dried blood on the soil around all your plants as early in the season as you can, and repeat after heavy rain. Note: If you have dogs, it’s probably best to avoid this method because they will likely be attracted to the scent and potentially dig up your garden.
Don’t solely rely on repellents. The most effective way of keeping out rabbits is chicken wire fencing. Install a fence that is 4 feet high and bury it 6 inches deep. Bend the fence’s top foot away from the garden similarly to a security fence so that they are unable to climb or jump over it. For fresh bulbs, try securing a cage or dome of chicken wire over the beds.
Rabbits prefer to not leave their shelters, so if you reduce the possible rabbit homes around your yard this will help deter them. Brushing away piles of brush and leaves, and filling in abandoned burrows are also means of prevention. Hopefully, if a rabbit doesn’t have a place to live, it won’t stay long. Rabbits will also breed much more efficiently if they have a suitable habitat available—all the more reason to provide nothing!

What Do Rabbits Dislike?

According to rabbit experts, rabbits have plant preferences based on taste, nutritional value, the presence of poison or prickles, and ease of availability. Their food tastes can also vary by season and even region, so not all plants work for all rabbit species. Do your research, and then tend plants that your local rabbits don’t find very tasty.

Rabbits tend to avoid a few of the same plants as Japanese beetles and deer.

If you’d like to control all these critters, choose plants such as:

Lilac bushes
Daffodils
Lavender
Marigolds
Forsythia
Snapdragons
Zinnias

These will likely help to reduce your rabbit population. Obviously, these are not is not a guaranteed solution, as hungry rabbits will eat almost anything. However, filling your garden with these plants might make your garden less appetizing than another one.

If all else fails, calling a wildlife professional at Hogarth’s Pest Control is always a great option. We are skilled in trapping and relocating sometimes required for rabbit control. If you are experiencing an unrelenting issue with rabbits in your garden this spring, don’t hesitate to reach out today!

Squirrels and Jack O’Lanterns

Pumpkins are tempting treats for many unwanted pests, but most especially squirrels. If you have jack o’ lanterns outside of your home and are concerned about squirrels ruining them, here are some strategies to deter them.

Use a commercial repellent

Look for a brand made using rotten eggs. This will have a strong odor, especially right after it is applied. The smell should fade when the repellent dries, but you should spray your pumpkin away from the home.

Squirrels hate pets

Sprinkle some pet hair around your pumpkin.

Spicy Surprise

You can also mix hot sauce, water, and a drop of dish soap or vegetable oil to help the mixture stick to the pumpkins. You will need to spray them every day, and especially after it rains.

Straight up tabasco sauce can be an effective repellent as well, but it can become messy and can potentially stain both the pumpkin and your porch.

DIY Stink Bomb

Squirrels are repelled by the smell of distilled white vinegar. Vinegar can damage the pumpkin’s skin, so we suggest putting some in a bowl by the pumpkins.

Making a mixture of one part eucalyptus oil, ten parts water, and a drop of vegetable oil or dish soap to help it stick is also known to help. Apply iwith a cotton ball, repeating daily and after it rains.

Stick it to ’em

Squirrels dislike anything sticky. Another option is to coat your pumpkins with a generous coating of a vapor rub or petroleum jelly. This can last for weeks, even through rain.

You can also coat your pumpkins with a spray lacquer, letting it dry. This method will keep away some squirrels, but not every one of them. The spray must be applied to the whole pumpkin, inside and out.

Another solution is to spray the pumpkins with hairspray. You will need to reapply this every day or two, as well as after it rains.

When it doubt, scare them out

Owls are natural predators of squirrels. You will frighten squirrels by placing an owl statue near the pumpkins.

Another option is to place motion-activated devices near the pumpkins to frighten away squirrels.

Make Halloween Safe Again

Halloween spending has skyrocketed in recent years. The National Retail Federation has stated that “Americans are expected to spend $2.7 billion on Halloween decorations this year”.

In turn, wildlife organizations say they have also seen an increase in animal visits to local rehabilitation centers for injuries related to outdoor holiday decorations.

Halloween any other holiday in which homeowners decorate the exteriors of their houses is particularly dangerous for wildlife populations. Anything that hangs, flutters, or loops can be potential hazards. Increased human activity and scattered candy wrappers during Halloween can also put animals at risk.

We want to share some easy ways you can help make sure this Halloween isn’t a scary one for wildlife!

Keeping Wildlife Safe on Halloween

Limit the use of fake spiderweb or other decorations made of entangling fibers. Wild animals can easily become unable to break the material to free themselves.
Avoid decorations with loops and circles. A foraging animal can unknowingly put its head through a loop or circle and choke.
Avoid decorations with edible-looking parts.
Don’t leave candy where wildlife may find it, always being sure to dispose of candy wrappers.
Carved pumpkins may also be attractive to wildlife as food, so properly dispose of them to avoid unwanted, post-holiday trick-or-treaters.
Be on the look for nocturnal wildlife while out trick-or-treating. Avoid cutting through lawns and brushy areas to avoid accidental encounters.
Drivers on Halloween night know to be alert for children; however, we encourage you to keep an eye out for wildlife that may be scared out by all the increased nighttime activity.
Strings of lights can become snare traps for adult male deer who get them caught in their antlers. As a result, avoid hanging lights or decorations in areas where deer pass.

Wildlife is not the only at-risk critters this Halloween. It is important to be mindful of household pets, too!

Tips for Keeping Household Pets Safe on Halloween

Stash your treats.

The candy bowl is for trick-or-treaters, not the household dog. Several popular Halloween treats are highly toxic to pets. Chocolate in any form—especially dark or baking chocolate—can be very dangerous for cats and dogs; candies labeled ‘sugar-free’ contain the sugar substitute xylitol which can cause serious problems in animals.

Watch decorations and keep wires out of reach.

While a jack-o-lantern is certainly festive, pets can easily knock over a lit pumpkin and start a fire. That being said, curious kittens are especially at risk of getting hurt by candle flames. Popular Halloween plants such as pumpkins and corn are relatively nontoxic but have the ability to produce stomach discomfort in pets who snack on them.

Be mindful of costumes.

For some pets wearing a costume can become stressful. If you do decide to dress up your pet, be sure the costume does not limit his or her sight, ability to breathe, move, bark, or meow. Check the costume carefully for easily chewed-off pieces that could become a choking hazard. Poorly fitting outfits can become twisted on external objects and result in injury.

Be sure to try on the costume before the event; however, if they seem distressed or show abnormal behaviors, consider foregoing.

Keep pets easily identifiable.

Halloween brings exciting activity with visitors arriving at the door; overstimulation and strangers can often become scary and stressful for pets. Even the most social animals should be kept away from the door during trick-or-treating hours. While opening the door, be sure that your pet doesn’t dart out. Always make sure your pet is wearing proper identification!

The main goal of Halloween along with any other holiday you decorate for is to have fun. It is important, however, to always be mindful of how we affect those around us— animals too!

“Halloween Home Decor Can Hurt Wildlife, Officials Warn.” WDRB, 17 Oct. 2019, www.wdrb.com/news/national/halloween-home-decor-can-hurt-wildlife-officials-warn/article_fd700df2-f100-11e9-8162-47f987f12c4e.html.

Oh Deer

History

White-tailed deer were all but extinct in the eastern United States at the end of the 19th century; their population reduced to remnant herds in isolated redoubts.

What caused their numbers to plummet? Firstly, the arrival of European fur traders created a demand for hides. Then, colonists and commercial hunters poured in and began a slaughter spanning three hundred years. Ernest Thompson Seton, a naturalist, estimated that by 1890 we had reduced the pre-Columbian population of around 30 million to roughly 350,000.

But, conservationists brought them back. It took decades.

Aftermath

The events that transpired in the late 20th century was unnatural. Whitetail populations skyrocketed, especially in areas of suburban and exurban sprawl, which were primarily off-limits to hunters and almost entirely devoid of natural predators. For whitetails, this habitat proved to be better than an unpopulated forest.

Today, with a restored whitetail population of 25 million to 40 million, foresters have begun to complain that high concentrations inhibit the growth of new trees. The animals feed on seedlings and other young vegetation and browse as high as they can reach, even standing on their hind legs. In some areas throughout the US, deer have become de facto forest managers, determining what eastern woodlands will look like 50 or 100 years from now.

Modern-Day

Hunters, long shunned, are now being welcomed with open arms into some communities to trim deer hoards. Sometimes local governments hire professional sharpshooters to protect woods, parks, and neighborhoods; predictably, these moves have caused controversy.

One also thinks of the emotional distress suffered by the 4,000 drivers in the United States who hit deer yearly should be kept in mind.

Let’s take a look at the ecology.

“The Science of Overabundance,” a book published by the Smithsonian over 15 years ago, asserted that even then, many areas were too dense with whitetails. The book, written by 42 wildlife biologists, defined overabundance as “when deer threaten human life or livelihood, when they depress densities of favored species, they are too numerous for their excellence when they cause ecosystem dysfunction.”

How to Control

Their habitats vary widely, of course, but a good rule of thumb is that once the population exceeds 20 deer per square mile, they begin to diminish the vegetation on which they feed.

Humans, along with mountain lions and wolves, have been whitetail’s primary predators since the end of the most recent Ice Age. Evidence suggests that humans have killed more deer than every other predator combined. In the past few decades, however, towns, townships, and in some cases, entire counties have outlawed the discharging of firearms. (Hunters do kill around 100 people each year, mainly one another, in cases of trigger happy confusion. Statistically, deer kill more than twice that number in deer-on-vehicle collisions).

The result has been that for the first time in over 11,000 years, vast swaths of habitat in the heart of the white-tailed deer’s range are off-limits to their primary predator. Though coyotes as well as vehicles unavoidably kill deer, it’s not enough to keep populations at bay in many of these areas. This is why hunting seasons are imperative in states including Michigan.

Our Services

You may be thinking, what does deer hunting have anything to do with pest control? Well, without proper population control, herds take to large open areas such as golf courses, airports, and other outdoor spaces. Airports, for example, will have issues with deer if they do not have fencing that is 12 ft or higher. Anything less than will allow them to jump over and become a hazard for aircraft. Deer prefer to stay within a particular area and will rarely venture off to join a new herd; if they do, it is typical of the other herd not to accept the animal. Their herds can include up to 25 members! This is why management and population control is so important.

Hogarth Pest Control & Wildlife Removal has been trained and certified to shoot in sensitive environments and can remove overpopulated deer to provide a safer environment for the client.

McShea, William J., et al. The Science of Overabundance: Deer Ecology and Population Management. Smithsonian Institution, 2003.

Organized or OCD?

Ah, the simple pleasure of an impeccably organized pantry. Who doesn’t feel at least slightly re-energized after a bout of over-the-top arranging? As it turns out, squirrels might feel the same way about neatly-organized nuts.

Scientists from the University of California Berkeley report that nut-hoarding squirrel species can be quite particular about their nut caches, putting them away in neat little groupings. This strategy helps them remember where all of their hiding places are. The findings point to just how mentally taxing caching nuts is; however, the organizational abilities of squirrels only go so far.

Aptly called “scatter-hoarders,” squirrels create lots of small caches where they store their loot; lest a crafty competitor or natural disaster wipes out their stockpiles. By having lots of small stashes all over the place, the squirrels ensure that at least some will stay safe. But the more caches you make, the more difficult it becomes to remember where all of them are. That’s where organization skills go a long way, cognitively speaking.

When we humans organize, we tend to put group things into discrete units. Scientists call this “chunking.” We humans do it daily, most regularly with phone numbers. Whether we realize it or not, we break the number into smaller strings—the area code, followed by the first three digits, and then the last four, rather than try to recall an unbroken line of numbers.

This type of chunking helps us remember locations, too. If you have 50 books, you’re never going to be able to recognize the exact location of each one on a bookshelf. But you could likely find any given book if you split the books into categories—say, non-fiction and fiction—and took a mental note of where each chunk is.

Chunking

We consider chunking a key mechanism of human cognition; studies have shown that rats and other animals can also use this critical memory recall strategy (aka mnemonic) in a laboratory setting. However, tests for chunking in wildlife are few and far between.

To find out if squirrels are chunkers, researchers from UC Berkeley gave 45 free-ranging Eastern fox squirrels a series of sixteen seeds from a central location: four each from four different species of plant. Some of the time, they gave them in organized groups. Others, they gave the nuts in a pseudorandom order, where they were mixed, and no species was presented twice in a row.

When the squirrels hid their loot, the scientists used GPS to record the location of each cache. They then reran the experiment, but this time, each time a squirrel hid a nut, the experimenters gave the next from that spot but later on, thus handing out the nuts from different locations each time. Then, they compared how often the squirrels overlapped nut varieties in their caches in each of the trials.

The Experiment

As the fastidious hoarders they are, the squirrels took the nuts handed out from the isolated central location and put them into species-specific storage. It made no difference what order the nuts were handed out in. “This first demonstration of chunking in a scatter-hoarder underscores the cognitive demand of scatter-hoarding,” the authors wrote. If it weren’t mentally taxing to remember all of the hiding spots, the animals wouldn’t need chunking to keep track of their findings.

However, when the researchers began handing out nuts from multiple locations, the animals’ neat little system started to break down. When the nut species were handed out in sequence from various locations, the species overlap was minimal, including up to only two species per cache. However, when everything was mixed and handed out from different places, the rodents’ organizing skills failed. Instead of grouping nuts by species, the squirrels appeared to avoid caching in the same areas as they had previously.

The Results

It’s unclear why the animals changed strategies. The pseudorandom order from multiple locations put a tremendous memory burden on their brains; so the animals should have needed a mnemonic device to remember their organized caches even more than before accurately. It’s possible that their mental capacity couldn’t handle the overload of information. Or, the strategy switch may have been due to the increase in the energetic demand of the organized grouping nuts by species and location when the different nuts are handed out so far apart from one another.

When you actually think about it, the mental energy it likely takes to be a scatter-hoarding squirrel is quite astronomical. Most humans find it hard enough to locate their keys after they put them down ten minutes ago; imagine remembering where you buried a nut in the woods weeks after!

The photo included shows an example of chunking we discovered in a generational squirrel job. We had never seen anything like it in all our years of service, but after finding this study, we are curious to know if we will ever stumble upon a nut hoard again!

Anwar, Yasmin. “Fox Squirrels Use’ Chunking’ to Organize Their Favorite Nuts.” Berkeley News, 15 Sept. 2017, news.berkeley.edu/2017/09/12/nut-chunking/.

Coyote Ugly

As spring approaches, it is not unlikely to hear the all-too-familiar howls and yips from our less than friendly neighbors, the coyote. People tend to report seeing more of these predators this time of year because they are breeding. Their breeding season typically begins in January and runs through March, depending on the weather; with this year’s mild winter, it’s safe to say the mating season is well underway.

People are most likely to spot coyotes during their mating season, which occurs in Michigan from mid-January to March. As the fall months approach, pups begin leaving their den sites to establish home ranges of their own. Unfortunately, these young dispersing animals can wander into urban areas. Coyotes are active both day and night; however, activity peaks at sunrise and sunset, and they generally feed in the night.

Diet & Habits

According to Michigan’s DNR, coyotes are opportunistic creatures and will eat almost whatever is available. Smaller mammals such as shrews, mice, voles, squirrels, and r abbits are their preferred food sources. However, as true omnivores, they also feed on berries, fruits, insects, frogs, birds, snakes, seeds, and plants.

In urban areas, coyotes eat garden vegetables, garbage, and pet food. They also tend to prey on unattended household pets if the opportunity arises. Some coyotes even learn to kill smaller livestock, such as calves, goats, sheep, and poultry.

Although coyotes have become a common sight throughout Michigan, including in urban areas, they are generally timid and do try to avoid or limit human contact. According to the Michigan DNR, their presence in subdivisions and urban or suburban areas, while surprising to many folks, as a result of increasing populations (both coyote and human) and encroachment of human environments into their natural habitat.

In most cases, you can avoid a coyote by posing a threat. The coyote will typically retain its fear of people and easily scare away. This may not work, however, if the coyote is being fed or if there are food sources like pet food or bird feeders in the area.

Coyote Mating

Coyotes are monogamous and can maintain couplings that last for several years. New mates are only accepted after the removal of one of the pair. Mated male coyotes attend to the females who give birth to the annual litter in an underground den; these dens are often used year after year unless the coyotes feel threatened. Because their breeding season runs from January through March, the pups are born in the early spring. Litter size depends on a variety of factors but typically ranges from four to seven.

Not only can they make a meal of your beloved pet, but they can try to mate with them as well. It is important to always spay or neuter your dogs. Coyotes are attracted to and can mate with unsprayed or unneutered domestic dogs. Unspayed female dogs in season can attract male coyotes. While there has been successful hybridization of “coydogs”, this is not a recommended practice.

When you see a coyote

Never approach or touch a coyote.
Never intentionally feed a coyote.
Eliminate all outside food sources, especially pet foods and bird feeders.
Put garbage out the morning of the pick-up day.
Regularly clear out wood and brush piles; they are suitable habitat for squirrels or mice and can attract coyotes.
Do not allow pets to roam free— consider keeping pets indoors or accompany them outside, especially at night.
If you spot a coyote, make a lot of noise to scare it away (yell, clap your hands)

Though the propensity of encountering a coyote is greater due to population increase, there are ways you can go about avoiding a potentially dangerous situation. If you are experiencing issues with a particularly pesky coyote, be sure to contact a professional. We do provide Urban Marksmanship services, and would be happy to assist you! Give us a call today.