Remember the Nuisance Wildlife this Spring

Spring welcomes us with longer days and moderate temperatures. Outdoor activities pick up once again. Whether it's kids returning to the playground or playing baseball or adults taking a walk on a nature trail or playing a round of golf, the beautiful outdoors beckons us. But it's not just human activities that change during the Spring. Nuisance wildlife returns to its busy schedule, ready to shake off the cold months of winter.

Nuisance wildlife should be enjoyed from a healthy distance. Unfortunately, many children have no appreciation of the risk and dangers of wildlife. Their only interaction with animals is a pet dog or cat and, possibly, a mouse or some other rodent. Children watch animated films with friendly dancing and talking animals that are blessed with human expressions, behaviors, and emotions. 

Raccoons are portrayed as mischievous little bandits. Opossums are overacting hams that can play dead better than a Shakespearean actor. Squirrels are silly, overactive nut-hoarding acrobats. Whatever children may think of Mickey Mouse, Rocky Raccoon, or Simon the Squirrel, nuisance wildlife are not their friends. Children need to be taught that wildlife does not understand the concept of tag or any other game. Whatever wild animals understand is purely instinctual. They are concerned about gathering food, protecting themselves and their young, and fighting back against any perceived threats.

For safety’s sake, children must learn to never to chase, touch, or pick up any nuisance wildlife, dead or alive, as well as nuisance wildlife that can be caught may be diseased or injured and likely to bite. Deceased nuisance wildlife can be rife with disease. Some may not be dead at all. The opossum, for example, has an unusual defense mechanism, an involuntary comatose-like state induced by fear. An inert opossum is often left alone by predators that want to chase, catch, and kill their prey. Although some children know that opossums “play dead,” others learn the hard way. They pick up a “dead” opossum by the tail and are inevitably bitten once the animal reanimates itself. Also, with nuisance wildlife, especially squirrels and raccoons, there is nothing more vicious than a frothing-at-the-mouth mother protecting its nest. These nuisance wildlife have razor-sharp teeth that can easily bite off fingers.

So why do we have conflicts with wildlife? Certain species of wildlife such as squirrels, opossums, raccoons, bats, voles, mice, and rats have managed to thrive in human habitats. We’re building homes farther into wooded areas and we’ve created appealing surroundings for them.   The trend is to “naturalize” our surroundings in order to be one with nature. And with nuisance wildlife, just like with people, if you offer free food and comfortable surroundings, they will come. And nuisance wildlife isn’t polite.  Once they find a nice place, they’re in no rush to leave.

If there is one characteristic common to nuisance wildlife, it is their ability to adapt and use human habitats to their own advantage. Raccoons, for example, can live in attics, chimneys and even sewers. These animals also have an undiscriminating palate with the ability to eating a wide variety of foods and carbon-based compounds that we would not even think to classify as food. For example, the garbage-eating opossum eats virtually anything in its path from road kill to rotting food in a compost pile. The omnivorous squirrel eats far more than just nuts and seeds. They forage in trashcans for any leftovers and dig in gardens and flowerpots looking for edible bulbs.  Skunks will shred large sections of your lawn just to eat some grubs.

When does a nuisance wildlife species become a pest? It’s all a matter of degree. Wildlife changes from something to be enjoyed to a nuisance once they engage in behavior that crosses the line of being tolerable. Humans like nature so long as it’s on their terms. We enjoy the acrobatic squirrel doing his high-wire act on a telephone line or the cute bunny that occasionally visits our back yard. But when wildlife takes up permanent residency in and around our homes, these same critters quickly loose those qualities that we enjoy at a distance.

Groundhogs are capable of building large underground tunnels that can cause your lawn to cave in. Other burrowing animals such as chipmunks and skunks can dig under your foundation, driveway, or retaining walls, causing serious damages. Rodents such as chipmunks, mice, and squirrels gnaw on hard objects to wear down their teeth. Those objects can include your deck, siding, or down spouts. During the spring mating season, male skunks battle each other over females, not hesitating to release their noxious, pungent scent. When this fighting is done near or under our home, it is something we could do without.

In close quarters, wildlife and humans have trouble existing in harmony. We cannot safely share our home with these critters. Outside the home is difficult enough, but once inside the home, wildlife is a serious, health problem requiring immediate attention. They cause extensive property damage with their nesting activities and can even start fires from chewing electrical wires. The smells and odors of wildlife, with urine saturating insulation and seeping into drywall, as well as their noxious droppings, can drive someone out of their own home.

Wildlife can cause injury to humans not only through bites and scratches, but also through their droppings. Nuisance wildlife and rodent droppings and urine can be a toxic brew of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites capable of transmitting a host of serious, often fatal, diseases to humans and their pets. Even the seemingly innocuous cottontail rabbit is often a carrier of tularemia, a serious bacterial disease. Tularemia can be transmitted to our pets through consuming contaminated water or transmitted to people via an infected tick. Perhaps the most well-known and feared wildlife disease of all is rabies, a viral disease of the central nervous system that is spread when infected animals bite or scratch another animal or human. In humans, without a prompt post-exposure vaccination, rabies causes acute inflammation of the brain.  It is fatal once neurological symptoms have developed. Although rabies is responsible for about 100,000 deaths throughout the world, in the United States, rabies is relatively rare. When an incident does occur, it can be traced to raccoons, skunks, or bats.  Raccoons, in addition to being common carriers of rabies, also transmit distemper and roundworm. Please let your children know that if they come across one of these “masked bandits” at a playground or anywhere outside, stay away. Based on my years of experience in wildlife removal, raccoons are one of the most dangerous nuisance wildlife we face in New Jersey. These nuisance wildlife are large and powerful.  If they are cornered or if you happen to walk toward a raccoon nest, these animals become vicious.

Lesser know wildlife diseases are histoplasmosis and leptosporosis. Histoplasmosis is a fungal infection caused by breathing the spores of bird and bat droppings. It can cause respiratory ailments and meningitis. Leptosporosis is a bacterial infection caused by coming in contact with or consuming water contaminated by the urine of infected animals. It can lead to organ failure, meningitis, and encephalitis. If these diseases weren’t frightening enough, bubonic plague, that horrific disease of the Middle Ages, still rears its ugly head. This bacterial infection is transmitted from fleas that have fed on infected animals. In the United States, cases of plague, which fortunately are rare, can usually be traced to the infected blood of squirrels, not rats.

Any mention of the dangers of wildlife-human interactions would be incomplete without mentioning ticks and tick-borne diseases. Often, it is not necessary for an infected animal to bite you. Instead, a blood-carrying tick is happy to act as the middleman. When ticks bite and draw blood, they pick up different pathogens swimming in the blood from one animal, the reservoir host, and transfer that diseased blood to whatever or whomever is unlucky enough to be the next blood meal. Thanks to ticks, the infected blood from a white-footed mouse, which is the principal reservoir host for Lyme disease, winds up in the bloodstream of a person.

Lyme Disease is the most publicized and well-known tick-borne illness with more than 35,000 Americans affected each year. Most cases occur in the Northeast (the disease is named after the Connecticut town which had some of the earliest reported cases in the mid-1970s).   However, in a recent MSNBC report, doctors are reporting a sharp rise in potentially deadly non-Lyme infections or “under the radar” tick diseases most notably babesiosis, an infection caused by a parasite that lives in red blood cells. Unlike Lyme disease, babesiosis has a fatality rate approaching 10%. These tick diseases have symptoms such as fever, headache, and muscle and joint pain making it easy to misdiagnose. Also, one tick may transfer multiple pathogens resulting in multiple co-infections.  Also, in 2009, an incident of perinatal babesiosis was reported in Monmouth County. A mother who was bitten by two ticks when she was eight months pregnant unknowingly infected her baby.

Never forget the “wild” in nuisance wildlife. If critters have made their home in and around yours, it is important to take immediate action and contact Little Rascals by Cowleys Young children must understand that it is never safe to approach a nuisance wildlife -- even one doesn’t seem to be afraid. A squirrel may be willing to take food out of your hand, but it may just as easily bite you immediately afterward. The one thing predictable about nuisance wildlife is their unpredictability. Urban wildlife may overcome their instinctive fear of humans. But don’t let that fool you. Nuisance wildlife are inherently dangerous. They're capable of causing serious injury at any time and are carriers of life-threatening diseases.