12/20/07

Raccoon Family Reunited:
Critter Eviction our Specialty


After successfully evicting a mother raccoon from within the walls of a Spansion facility, Guin McDaid, a T.L.C. employee, had the difficult mission of locating and trapping the raccoon's young offspring. This proved to be a hard task, as they had flaunted every previous attempt to trap and evict them. McDade could hear the offspring, but could not locate them so she grabbed a Spansion product, the Fab Wafer, and polished it. She then cut a small hole in the wall and by using the polished wafer as a mirror, she was able to spot the two baby raccoons and safely remove them from their residence within Spansion's walls. The baby raccoons were taken to Austin's Wildlife Rescue Center where they were successfully reunited and accepted back by their mother...
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The Futures' Bat Conservationists:
Bats play an essential part in keeping the balance of our ecosystem. This is why we here at Town Lake Construction think its crutial to teach the future generations about bat conservation and how they can help, at any age...

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CEU Courses:
Town Lake Construction is now a state approved CEU provider for pest and wildlife control, emphasizing on bat and bird abatement issues, laws and the proper, legal abatement procedures. Our courses are appropriate for pest control and maintenance professionals, building engineers and property managers, as well as architects...

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11/20/07

Bat Exclusion:
Why You Need A Professional

Over 100-million Mexican Free-tailed bats eat an estimated 1,000 tons of insects every night in Central Texas, helping to make life in the humid, river's edge city of Austin a pleasant experience. But as helpful as they are, you still don't want them in your buildings.
During my fifteen years of providing bat exclusion services, I've seen just about every scenario that can arise, and in about every type of building you can imagine.
One common scenario occurs in commercial and institutional environments, where we arrive to find a botched previous attempt at exclusion made by maintenance personnel. Almost every time, an inexperienced approach to ridding a commercial building of bats results in dead bats and more problems. It's a senseless loss, and always adds to the cost of resolving the issue. I've seen many cases where hundreds of bats died inside walls or were forced inside buildings due to the efforts of untrained maintenance personnel armed with a can of foamy spray and "how to" instructions off of the Internet. But the truth is you have to understand the behavior and habits of the bats and be willing to do whatever is required to reach all the entry points, if the exclusion is going to work. That often takes an experienced crew hundreds of hours to complete.
One example is a recent job on the UT campus here in Austin. We had to devise a customized caulking delivery system and suspend a crewman 50-feet in the air on a boson's chair to seal all of the entry points. If we had not sealed those, the problem would not have been resolved. In this and many other cases, doing the job correctly required enough knowledge of construction techniques and high-rise equipment that we could improvise an effective solution.
Now that you know your maintenance crew, though well meaning, isn't suited for the task, where do you turn when roosting bats have become a problem? Your best bet is to consult the BCI website (www.batcon.org) for a list of recommended specialists in your area. If there are none, check with local wildlife rescue and animal control organizations. They may be able to handle the job, or know someone who can. In lieu of that, check with your local pest control companies. However, although a pest control license covers dealing with bats, the training to obtain my own license barely touched upon bats and not at all on how to exclude them properly or humanely. Also most pest control companies have no expertise on building restoration and construction, or in the use of high-rise equipment. If you must go with a pest control company, question them thoroughly about their experience and what techniques they use. Although bat exclusion is a simple strategy, calling in a specialist, saves you time and money while ensuring the humane treatment or protection of this valuable environmental resource.
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