How We Solve Atlanta Wildlife Problems
It starts with your phone call. We answer our phones 24/7, and we will carefully listen to your wildlife problem. Every case is different, so we will ask appropriate questions to help
us understand the situation better. Questions like, "do you hear the noises at night or during the daytime?" or "what type of roof do you have?" After we have a general idea of your
situation, we can provide a ballpark price range, and schedule a same-day or next-day appointment to inspect your property.
INSPECTION: Once on site, we will perform a full inspection of your home and property. This allows us to use the correct strategy and traps. If the animals are in an attic, a full building inspection is crucial, including the following:
- All ground-level areas, such as piper or A/C line entry & exit areas, A/C chase bottoms, ground-level vents, etc.
- All mid-level areas, such as dryer vents, siding gaps, first floor eaves or dormers, etc.
- We inspect the entire roof, including all plumbing stacks, ridge caps, vents, and other potential gaps or holes.
- We also inspect inside your attic, to identify animals and damage they have caused.
- If the animals are outside, we notice many subtle clues that will assist us in a successful strategy.
TRAPPING, EXCLUSION, REMOVAL: Once we understand what animal species we are dealing with, and the problem, we use the most effective means of removing the animals. We use dozens of different types of traps.
- Trapping - If trapping the animal(s) in live cage traps, trap type, set, and location are crucial to success.
- Exclusion - Oftentimes, we are able to simply set one-way doors or other exclusion devices that allow the animals inside a building to safely exit, but never get back inside.
- Removal By Hand - Sometimes we actually remove animals by hand, or with special tools like snare poles.
- The Law - In all cases, we obey state and local laws regarding wildlife, but aim to take the most humane approach.
ENTRY HOLE REPAIRS: Repairs are a crucial step in the wildlife removal process. In many cases, such as bat or rodent control, the job cannot be performed without detailed repairs, and in all cases, sealing the entry holes shut ensures that no future wildlife will ever enter your home.
- 100% of the entry holes must be found, and sealed shut, or the job is not complete.
- Our repairs are professional contractor grade, look good, and when applicable we use steel, which rodents such as rats or squirrels are unable to chew through.
- We give a written guarantee on our repairs against any future animal entry.
ATTIC DECONTAMINATION SERVICES: It may be desirable to clean your attic after we've removed the animals. They can leave behind large amounts of droppings, urine, hair, oils, food, nesting material, and so on. These remnants can attract insects like cockroaches, and the scent left behind can encourage new animals to chew their way into your house. You might experience odor problems from the waste. It's possible that mold will grow on waste areas.
- We remove or vacuum all droppings, or remove all the soiled insulation.
- We fog the attic with a special enzyme-based cleaner that destroys any organic matter and deodorizes the space.
- We repair damage, such as ductwork, electrical wires, pipes, insulation, and more.
As a southern state, Atlanta has its share of snakes and armadillos. However, the most common critters we handle include rats, raccoons, bats, pigeons, opossums, and of course squirrels in the attic. We service the greater Atlanta GA area, including Fulton County, Gwinnett County, Cobb County, DeKalb County, and more. Some of the specific towns we travel to include downtown Atlanta of course, and the surrounding cities and towns of Sandy Springs, Roswell, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Marietta, Smyrna, Dunwoody, Brookhaven (North Atlanta), Mableton, Peachtree City, Peachtree Corners, Gainesville, East Point, Newnan, Redan, Milton, Douglasville, Kennesaw, Lawrenceville, Tucker, Duluth, Stockbridge and more.
This month's wildlife how-to article: How to get rats out of the attic
Rats are terrifying creatures to many people, not only because of the way that they look, but also because of the germs that they can carry and the damage that they can do to any household. To put it politely, if you have rats in your attic, you should most definitely be taking active measures to have them removed, and although one of the best methods that you can use in order to do so is to use a decent pest control company, there are certain steps that you can take yourself to try and get the problem under control.
There are a few steps that you should take if you want to remove your pest problem:
1. You should make sure that rats are actually the cause of your concern. There are other animals that could be causing those droppings or that nibbling – it could be mice and plenty of other creatures. Hearing little tapping noises can often indicate a squirrel, garbage rooting could be a raccoon problem; there are other animals that it could be. Two of the most common signs to show a rat infestation are droppings, as well as wire chewing.
2. How are these pests getting into your home? Your efforts to remove them will be positively fruitless if you do not block up their entrances and exits, and this is why it always best to use a pest control company to ensure that the problem is fixed properly. Check the house from top to bottom and back up again – they can crawl into the smallest of holes, and on the plus side, by blocking up the holes, you’ll be saving money on lost heat too!
3. Blocking the holes that you find can be a difficult task because rats will literally nibble their way through anything to get back into the place they have called their home. You should use a mixture of wire mesh and polyurethane foam sealer to do the job.
4. Trapping comes next, and this is the nasty part. There are a lot of different traps that you can try to use from the old fashioned “snap traps”, from which you will have to dispose of a dead or partially dead rodent, to sticky traps that are like superglue that the animals get stuck to. There are more humane traps that you can use, but remember that you will have to release them into the wild again, or call on a pest control company to remove them for you. Ideally, you are going to want to trap the rats where they are seen to be active – use their droppings for an idea of where they are running.
5. You should be checking your traps every day. If you leave it for a couple of days, you may leave a rat there that has died, which in turn will attract all sorts of other rodents and possible more rats. Get rid of them properly, (ask a pest control company for more advice) and once you are sure that all rats have been removed from your property, you should replace any damaged or dirty insulation, clear up any and all droppings, and use a special cleaner to basically “fog” the area that they have lived in.
Other Atlanta wildlife control how-to topics:
How to get Atlanta Opossum out of your attic
Atlanta GA Bat Removal - About Bat Biology
Atlanta Raccoon Removal - How to kill a Raccoon
How To get Rid of Squirrels in Atlanta GA
