01-16-08--5:30 P.M.

When the average person goes onto the internet to find a pest control company to solve their bird or bat problems, what they will find is that every pest control company with a website is the best, the largest, the most experienced and all of the rest of the industry is hugging their coat-tails trying to catch up. Bologna! After all, their can only be one pest control company that is the best, the largest and the most experienced, and that company just so happens to be my company, Town Lake Construction. O.K., you see what I am driving at?
We specialize in high-rise pest control, via bird and bat proofing of buildings, so we gain a tremendous amount of experience in these specific fields. We do not kill ants, trap rats or spray lawns. Day-in and day-out we service high-rise building, municipal buildings and commercial facilities. The same men that the other companies send to your job may have been trapping possums at 10 A.M., spraying for bugs at 2 P.M. and be ready to tackle your bird problem at 4 P.M. I shudder to think about it. Even with the constant exposure to our specific line of pest control, we go through many learning curves daily. When you hire a pest control company to set up a bird-control system 300 feet in the air, the last thing a business owner needs are technicians on their building, that have little, or no experience, which is very common in this industry. We don't spray to kill bugs, etc. even though we are licensed to do these things. If we are called to do it, we refer them to a pest control company that we like, which may I tell you is few and far between. You may ask why we don't take on this extra work, after all, everyone else that is the biggest, the largest and the best does it. The answer is, if we don't have the experience, the “know how”, and the capacity to be the best at it, or pretty close to the best, we don't want any part of it at all.

--Tom Regner

Let's talk about Austin, Texas as it relates to the protection and care of wildlife species. I have always heard that Austin, Texas is a certified “bird sanctuary” city. Not hardly. Although it has set aside thousands of acres to help preserve various animal habitats, i.e. warblers and salamanders, it greatly lacks in terms of offering help to injured animals once they are outside of those “protected” environments and sitting injured in your back yard or street. One would think there would be hundreds of resources in this city to help are befriended creatures. After all, we are the “Bat Capital of The World.” Our companies’ name, Town Lake Construction gets mixed up in the phone book directory with Town Lake Animal Shelter. We receive a lot of phone calls daily, because of this, from well meaning people trying to get rid of a bat/bird or to get help for an injured or displaced animal. I always listen politely to their story, before I tell them I can't help and to call Wildlife Rescue. If you are not familiar with this organization, they are a voluntary group of certified wildlife rehabilitators who tend to these injured animals. However, with their limited staff and budget, there is only so much Wildlife Rescue can do. Can you believe that Wildlife Rescue Service is just about the only place in Austin where you can get help for an injured bat, bird, etc? It's time for the City of Austin to do more for injured wildlife. How ‘bout we get rid of a few of the city-supported Condo projects and fund more groups, like Wildlife Rescue.

Here are a few helpful phone numbers and agencies I have found in preparing for this article:

~ Call 3-1-1 to report: Stray pets (cats excluded), animal bites (9-1-1 for emergency), animal cruelty (9-1-1 for emergency), injured wildlife, or to report the findings of a dead blue jay, crow, or hawk.

~ Call (512) 389-4848 (Texas Parks & Wildlife Game Warden) to report an injured deer.

~ Call (512) 472-WILD (Wildlife Rescue) to report other injured wildlife.

~ Call (512) 854-9613 (Animal Damage & Control) to report problem coyotes.

~ The North Austin Emergency veterinarian clinic is located at 12034 Research Blvd. in Austin; (512) 331-6121

~ The South Austin Emergency veterinarian clinic is located at 4434 Frontier Trail in Austin; (512) 899-0955

~ For information on Texas animal cruelty laws, visit www.animallaw.info/topics/spustexascruelty.htm

~ For information about West Nile Virus, contact the Health Department at 1-888-883-9997

11.08.07 -- 3:39PM

The hardest part of anything for me is at the beginning. Ideas come easy. Making something solid and useful from my ideas is something entirely different. You know, creating something from what’s between your ears. It sounded like a good idea; “yeah, let’s have a Blog on the new website”. Now sitting in front of my computer, I am at one of those moments…In the beginning, forming this Blog out of thin air and transforming it into what you see before you. Bear with me for a few more sentences while I try to transform some idea to write about. O.K., I’ve got one, let’s try to second guess what goes on in the mind of a, domesticated from the wild, bird. Not ready for it, me neither. Some other time perhaps, when I have had my next encounter with Albert Einstein disguised as a Grackle. Maybe I could talk about when I first starting excluding bats from buildings. I could theoretically do this but and in reality, the events which led up to my first “bat encounter” are much too entertaining and in depth for me to go into at this hour. Now I am at the moment of truth, what do I say now? “I like this industry!” Where can you go repelling off buildings and get paid for it? Some of the places I have had access to, range from the infamous book depository building in Dealey Plaza, The George Bush Governors Mansions, Darrel Royal Stadiums to movie sets and chance encounters with movie stars. I can’t remember how many times I have been interviewed for T.V. and the newspapers. You get the idea; we work in pretty cool places and meet a lot of interesting people. I never thought of the prestige we would gain when I first came up with this concept, way back in”93”. Another thing I really like about my business is the “specialist” aspect of our company. Most of my customers, have tried many ordinary pest control companies, to help them with their (insert animal) problem before I get the first call to do my “thing”. Desperation leads to some pretty accommodating circumstances for my Company, Town Lake Construction, which is now an LLC, formed to protect me from loosing my house. But I digress… so, the desperate conditions we come in to make us look like saviors on chariots, chariots in the form of pick up trucks with ladder racks. The scenario usually plays out like this: Bats are trapped in a building and are now swooping down on the accounting department, which incidentally really likes me now and will pay me in record time for our heroics, after we are finished, of course. After all, they are accountants. I like being “that guy’ who is a true specialist. Re-inventing the wheel and building a better mouse trap is an everyday occurrence for us. At least once an hour, I come up with some sort of contraption or new idea that will revolutionize the industry.

These are the topics which I can write about. So let me tell you about them one at a time…

-- Tom Regner