04/29/2007

Record-Eagle/Tyler Sipe
John Campeau, wife Candy Campeau, and their children Damen Campeau, 6, and Ashley Campeau, 4, discovered they had hundreds of bats living in the eaves and attic of their home and garage. They spent $3,000 out of pocket to have the bats evicted and their home sealed from the bats, which left nearly a foot and a half of guano underneath the roof.

Unwelcome Houseguests

As weather warms up, critters come out to play

By
Record-Eagle staff writer

Record-Eagle/Douglas Tesner
Joe Patterson, from Critter Control, checks a humane animal trap during his rounds.

A view of the bay might be worth half the pay, but Candy and John Campeau's house overlooking Lake Michigan came at an even higher cost.

The couple had barely moved into the 1940s red brick bungalow with its century-old barn-style garage last year than they started to notice something odd.

"We first noticed that we were getting droppings in the garage, on the cement floor and on the vehicles,” said Candy Campeau, 26, a Traverse City print shop employee. "Then we actually started to notice that we had bats flying around.”

As spring turned to summer, "a couple of bats” turned into a cloud of them. And the Campeaus, who by now were catching copious droppings in the garage with a makeshift tarp "ceiling,” realized they had a problem.

"Come the very beginning of summer we stood outside at dusk and proceeded to count the bats,” Candy Campeau said. "We lost track roughly at 150.”

While the balance between man and nature has always been delicate, population growth and increasing urbanization are leading to more frequent human-and-animal encounters. In northern Michigan, they often take place between Memorial and Labor days, particularly when summer residents are opening their cottages for the season.

But any building with spaces, cracks or holes to squeeze through — including chimneys and attic vents — is fair game for animals, especially in the colder months, said biologist Sean Carruth.

"They like to overwinter in those warmer structures, obviously coming out for food and water,” said Carruth, vice president for Traverse City-based Critter Control, a nationwide franchise business that specializes in the prevention and removal of so-called "nuisance” animals. "Come spring, they'll have their babies. That's usually when they get caught because that's when the babies start screaming and squealing when Mom goes out for food and water — and neighbors hear that.”

The most common home invaders in the Grand Traverse region are squirrels and raccoons, which can chew on electrical wires and split telephone lines and loose cable as they pull out insulation to make a nest, Carruth said. But mice, bats, possums, skunks and even birds also can lay claim to one's domain, wreaking havoc inside.

"In addition to the exterior damage where they make the hole to get in your house, they can also ruin your insulation with droppings or urine,” he said. "They'll stain your drywall, your roof, your ceiling.

"They're all seeking a better way of life. Unfortunately, they're using your residence to do that. That leads to more animal-human contact than we would like and also to ectoparasites in the home,” he added.

Preventing uninvited guests can be as easy as placing caps on the chimney and fireplace flu or installing roof vent guards and hardware cloth over the attic vent, Carruth said. But if that doesn't work, homeowners may need to call in a professional.

"There's a number of things you can do to animal-proof your home so we don't have to come in there and remove a traumatized animal,” he said. "Usually eliminating food sources and taking preventive measures to seal your home tight is enough to keep animals away.”

While they get plenty of calls about trespassing skunks and "rabid” raccoons, local animal control officers don't deal with wild animals unless the animals have bitten someone or pose a public health and safety risk, said Ed Hickey, animal control manager for Grand Traverse County.

Instead, officers refer callers to private animal removal agencies with DNR-issued Wildlife Damage and Nuisance Control permits or — like Leelanau County Animal Control Officer Paul Peschel — lend out live traps.

Joe Patterson and his employees responded to about 300 such calls last summer to remove animals from attics and crawl spaces, sheds and boats. Patterson said the most bizarre catches he ever made were a peacock and a 2-foot-long savanna monitor.

Owner of the Critter Control franchise in Traverse City, Patterson was staked out in his bright yellow truck on a recent weekday, waiting for a muskrat that had been digging holes in the bank to surface from a backyard pond. Like most of the other animals he removes, it would be live-trapped near its hole at the water's edge, then destroyed.

State law does not require the animals he catches to be killed, Patterson said. But wildlife can only be relocated on public property or on private property with an owner's permission. And he said few property owners or managers are willing to let his problem become theirs.

"Our biggest problem is: what you do with an animal the way the law reads?” he said.

Roy Reed, owner of Nuisance Animal Control based in Interlochen, has access to several acres of private land and said he relocates healthy animals there whenever he can.

In the six years he has been in the business, Reed has encountered everything from raccoons in a crawl space to a nest of garter snakes in a garage ceiling. But one of his most memorable calls was to a house where the owner complained of an odor.

"He had a funky smell and he thought it was up in the crawl space of his basement,” said Reed, who inspected the house thoroughly but could find nothing to account for the stench.

In the end, it was the owner himself who solved the riddle, he said.

"He'd been down there bringing a bag of chicken (from the freezer) upstairs. Either the phone rang and he set it down, or something else, but he forgot about it. That was the smell,” Reed said.

The odor upstairs in the Campeaus' home was no chicken. But eventually it became so overpowering that the couple had to remove their two young children from their bedrooms, where the noise of scratching from behind the walls could frequently be heard, said Candy Campeau.

By then, the family had learned that they had a nursing colony of perhaps 300 bats in their eaves and the attic of their garage. Although it would be a relatively simple matter to get rid of them using a one-way door or "bat exclusion valve” — bats leave their roost every evening around sunset — the operation couldn't begin until the young bats were old enough to fly.

Finally, after months of living with the problem — and the fear of rabies and lung disease — the family began the expensive process of exclusion, disinfection, repair and sealing.

"When they tore the roof off, we had, in some spots, a foot of bat droppings cooking in the roof,” Campeau recalled.

Although some of the cost, including a new roof, was covered by their homeowners insurance, the couple had to pay $3,000 out-of-pocket. Adding insult to injury, she said, they learned the neighbors were aware of the problem before they moved in.

"I was up in arms because we just bought this house. You don't expect to turn around and write a check for such an odd thing,” she said.

Now that it's spring, some of the bats have returned to roost at the peak of the garage. Because bats are instinctual and bat-proofing a house can sometimes take two or three seasons, Campeau said only time will tell if the problem has been completely eliminated.

Meanwhile, the family is crossing their fingers, she said.

"My son loves Batman, and for a while he was pretty sure he was Batman — he lived in the Bathouse," she said. "But bats are like raccoons. One raccoon is cute, but when you have 600 of them ... "