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Critter

April 4, 2004 1:09 am

INTER SUN bakes into a black tarpaper roof.

Mike Hurley and Larry Nibert have pushed past the lost tennis balls and scattered leaves that litter the top of a Fredericksburg building. The two men are perched on all fours, peering over opposite edges.

Office workers inside have been rattled by scratching sounds coming from the attic, and Hurley and Nibert have been called in to catch the culprit--possibly a squirrel.

They search for clues--claw marks, gnawed wood, animal hair--anything that might show them where the squirrel is getting in.

They find nothing.

Hurley heads back down to scour the structure at ground level: Solid brick. Sealed gutters.

No entry points here.

He winds around to the building's wooden back, skims past a prickly holly bush and skirts the poison ivy that wraps around a spindly tree.

There, he finds what he's looking for--a hole no bigger than a golf ball, just large enough for a squirrel to squeeze through.

Hurley signals to Nibert to fetch their co-worker.

"This is where it gets fun," Nibert says.

He grabs Tracy, a spry, 7-year-old Jack Russell terrier, specifically trained for the task at hand.

Inside, the trio gains access to the attic, climbs its wooden steps and searches by the light of bare bulbs. Amid cardboard boxes and packed-away Christmas ornaments, they uncover a second clue--tiny, black droppings.

Tracy's body quivers with excitement. She scurries across the dusty boards of the attic floor, plows beneath a pile of pink insulation and stuffs her nose in every nook and cranny.

She finds nothing.

It seems the squirrel in question has gone for now.

But he'll be back.

And so will they.

Chasing squirrels is just one of the services Mike Hurley offers through his business, ACS Wildlife Removal. The Spotsylvania County company strives to rid structures of the bats, snakes, skunks, possums and other varmints home- and business-owners love to hate.

Hurley dares to go where others won't. He slinks into attics, basements and crawl spaces in search of the scratching, chewing, clawing creatures that lurk there.

He takes some heat from animal activists for the work he does. But his customers don't complain.

Wild animals that take up residence inside human homes can cause thousands of dollars worth of damage, said Tim Julien, president of the National Wildlife Control Operators Association.

The urine and feces the creatures leave behind are bad enough. They also can carry fleas, parasites and disease. And those risks are small, Julien said, compared to the structural damage wild animals can wreak.

Chewed wood can weaken buildings. Holes can allow water to seep inside and cause drywall to rot or mold. And gnawed wires have been linked to house fires.

"These cold winter days when the squirrels don't want to come outside," Hurley said, "they're going to chew something."

Catching critters is second nature to Hurley, who grew up in the Appalachian mountain town of Kincaid, W.Va.

"We hunted, fished, trapped animals," said Hurley, 32. "That's what we did for fun."

When the stifled economy of his hometown drove him east to Spotsylvania, he found work in construction, then with the power company.

But when Hurley spotted a newspaper ad asking for a nuisance trapper in Northern Virginia, he knew he was the man for the job.

He sailed through his first assignments--catching the foxes that were preying on a breeder's Himalayan cats, and ridding a subdivision of the beavers whose activities were blocking its creek and flooding its yards.

James White, owner of ACS Wildlife & Snake Management in Hughesville, Md., was impressed with Hurley's instincts for handling animals.

"There are tons of people who think they can do it," White said about the wildlife management business. "There are only a handful who really can."

White introduced Hurley to some citified situations he hadn't encountered in West Virginia--birds in vents, raccoons in chimneys, geese on golf courses. Soon, Hurley branched out with his own Virginia franchise.

But would the Fredericksburg area need the services he had to offer?

"The first year, I'd pick up the phone, just to see if it was working," Hurley said. "Now, we can't get it to stop ringing."

Hurley heads out each morning to confront a slew of house-dwelling creatures.

He carries homemade bait and clunky metal traps that clank in the back of his truck. He wears gloves to ward off the constant threat of bites and the worry of contracting rabies.

A full-face respirator lets him maneuver through attics, where insulation can make him sneeze and temperatures can soar to more than 100 degrees during the summer.

He uses a flexible fiber-optic telescope to find the nests animals build inside walls, and he wields a high-powered vacuum to suck up fecal matter and nesting materials.

And then there's Tracy.

"She's the most expensive piece of equipment we've got," said Hurley, who had the canine flown into Richmond International Airport from Hart Farms Kennels in Collierville, Tenn.

She's certified to hunt possums, groundhogs, foxes and other animals, and she loves her job.

"She's more wired than any 10 kids on chocolate," Nibert said.

Weighing in at less than 10 pounds, Tracy wriggles into the small spaces, where Hurley could hardly hope to fit. She sniffs out nesting areas and animal carcasses, and chases pests into the traps Hurley sets.

Together, they have handled a gaggle of geese at Lake of the Woods, a raccoon crisis at Colonial Beach and a squirrel infestation in Fairfax, as well as other wildlife emergencies.

Recently, Hurley began chasing away the birds that flutter around the rafters at stores like Lowe's and Wal-Mart.

"Some jobs you can finish up in a day or two," said Hurley, who works as many as 16 hours a day for himself, and is employed full-time at General Electric. "Some jobs, you've really got your hands full."

Once business started booming, Hurley hired Nibert, a childhood friend from Kincaid.

"I would like to say I could handle all of Fredericksburg's critters by myself," Hurley said, "but the animal problem here is much more real than people think."

Hurley tries to handle the wildlife he stalks as humanely as possible. Whenever he can, he performs "exclusions," where he chases pests from structures, then patches any holes that could allow them to come back in.

Sometimes, though, he's forced to trap them, and state regulations require trapped animals to be euthanized.

"Relocation is not a good option," said Jerry Sims, regional wildlife biologist with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries in Fredericksburg. "The bottom line is that if [the animal] is a nuisance to you, it's going to be a nuisance to somebody else."

Plus, released creatures can pose a threat to the environment by exposing new populations of animals to parasites and disease.

"You have to consider the results of the release," said Julien, the NWCOA president, who also owns A&T Wildlife Management Services in Indianapolis. "People don't think about that."

Sims suggests folks nix the need for trapping in the first place by taking steps to keep animals out of their homes.

Food for birds and pets, open garbage cans and discarded table scraps can attract wild animals. Once they're near, they can come inside through uncovered chimneys and open spaces.

Ridding structures of unwanted wildlife is a relatively new business, and the rules that govern it are constantly changing.

While the laws evolve, so do Hurley's responsibilities. These days, he's burdened with paperwork--obtaining licenses, doing taxes and tending to his duties as state representative for the NWCOA.

But spring promises to send a bounty of work his way. And with it, he hopes to get back to the hands-on tasks of animal management he loves.

"It's not really a job," he said. "It's a passion."

To reach LISA CHINN: 540/374-5424 lchinn@freelancestar.com