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I Love Nature. I Just Don’t Want It on Me
A morning with a wildlife remover helped me understand why raccoons, ticks, bats and moles keep getting a little too close
The author tries to outsmart summer pests and somehow ends up advocating for a freelance opossum.
Peter Arkle
It’s 8 a.m., and I’m riding shotgun in a golf cart on an Arnold Palmer–designed course in Cedar, Michigan, trying very hard not to whisper lines from Caddyshack.
Ron Baker, better known around here as Trapper Ron, steers across the fairway while I watch for red flags poking out of the grass. Each flag marks a cluster of spring-loaded scissor traps. Somewhere beneath us, moles are having a terrible morning.
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Baker wears a sleeveless black T-shirt and has a gray beard, a deep tan and a bald-eagle tattoo on his arm. Every few yards, he stops the cart, climbs out and pulls another trap from the earth.
Then he checks one and gives a brief, satisfied verdict: “Gotcha.”
There it is, our first mole of the morning. Dead, compact and velvety, like a tiny underground purse with paws. Baker holds it up and asks if I want to pet it. I do, because journalism sometimes requires courage, and also because I’ve made worse decisions before breakfast.
Ron Baker, better known as Trapper Ron, knows what’s under your deck, in your attic and what's casing your bird feeder.
Peter Arkle
Baker, 60, is the owner of Trapper Ron’s Animal Removal Service, located in Leelanau County and permitted by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources as a wildlife damage and nuisance animal-control operator. He’s been in business for almost 30 years. Moles are only part of his operation.
“Generally, we get between 300 and 400 calls about live animals during the summer,” he says. “We get around 2,000 moles a year and 500 raccoons, skunks and possums.”
His phone never stops ringing. During our morning together, Baker gets a call from a woman who has otters under her dock. He listens for a moment, then explains the problem with the calm of a man who’s heard every possible version of nature becoming a customer-service issue.
“Yeah, they poop like humans,” he tells her. “They make a mess.”
I respect Baker immediately because he talks about wild animals the way other people talk about surly teenagers. Raccoon, possum, skunk, groundhog: He approaches them all with the casual confidence of somebody picking up a cranky house cat by the scruff.
Are the critters coming for us?
I’ve come out with him because I spend a few weeks every summer at my family’s cottage in northern Michigan, and lately the animal kingdom has started to feel less like scenery and more like a series of ongoing negotiations. The woods are peaceful until something starts crawling, scratching, chewing or possibly nesting nearby. Then I become less Thoreau and more building superintendent. What’s in the grass? What’s near the roofline? What’s in the trash? Why does every walk now require socks, spray, tweezers and a post-walk full-body inspection?
I love nature, I just don’t want it on me.
That’s the central tension of middle-aged outdoor life. I want lake air, pine shade and loons calling across the water. I just know more than I used to about ticks, bats in attics, raccoons in garbage and skunks under porches.
For example, tick anxiety has gone national. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says tickborne diseases are becoming a greater threat to people in the United States, and last spring it reported that emergency room visits for tick bites were higher than normal in much of the country. Lyme disease remains the most common pest-spread disease in the country, and the CDC estimates that nearly half a million Americans may be diagnosed and treated for it every year.
Nature’s least respectful roommates, ranked by threat level and their ability to ruin a porch.
Peter Arkle
This is how a person starts treating a walk to the mailbox like an act of war. I’ve adopted the full defensive posture. I wear permethrin-treated clothes and long socks, keep tweezers in strategic locations, and carry the grim personal knowledge that ticks enjoy the places you least want to discuss with a stranger from urgent care.
At one point I attempted to solve this problem by proposing that my wife and I acquire a “temporary” summer opossum. The internet had assured me that opossums wander the night like little Roombas, vacuuming up ticks before they can reach my ankles. It was a beautiful plan because it required no sacrifice from me beyond importing a wild animal and asking my wife to be reasonable about it.
Then science arrived. Cecilia Hennessy LaBonté, a wildlife biologist and former biology professor at Illinois’ Eureka College who has studied wildlife genetics and disease, tested the opossum-as-tick-control theory. She and a research partner microscopically examined the stomach contents of 32 opossums and reviewed published reports of opossum diets dating back to 1851. The results were not helpful to my marsupial-based prevention strategy.
“Opossums don’t eat ticks,” she says.
This is devastating to hear when you’ve built an entire household pest-management strategy around acquiring a porch possum.
Baker isn’t surprised. He likes opossums well enough but doesn’t endorse my plan, mostly because animals are terrible at respecting the job descriptions we invent for them. We want the opossum to eat ticks, the squirrel to ignore the feeder, the raccoon to show basic garbage manners, and the bat to understand that the attic is private.
Meanwhile, animals keep doing what animals do whenever we leave out food, spill birdseed, store trash like a raccoon tapas bar and build warm, dry structures full of openings.
“Some people whine about the squirrels and how they’re after their bird feeders,” Baker says. “The obvious thing is to stop feeding the birds.”
This, I suspect, is where the animal kingdom has us. We keep saying wildlife is invading us when much of the time we’ve built them a buffet with central air.
Jared Duquette, a human-wildlife interactions specialist with the Michigan DNR Wildlife Division, puts it more diplomatically: “Supplying copious amounts of unnatural food is the most common mistake homeowners or cottage owners make that can lead to nuisance concerns with wildlife.” Open trash, dirty grills and gaps in roof soffits can all create problems. So can salt. Porcupines crave it, according to Baker. In winter, people use rock salt or ice melt (commonly made with salt), and Baker says the residue from both can turn decks and wooden walkways into chew toys. “Up here, they’ll destroy a house,” he says.
I learned several useful things from Baker during our morning together. A baby porcupine is called a porcupette, which sounds like a children’s book character who wears a beret. Groundhogs are cagey little combat veterans. “When you trap a groundhog and he gets out, you’re never going to trap him again,” Baker says. “So you get one shot at it.”
The more you know …
I also learned that Baker has a complicated relationship with skunks. “I’ve been nailed directly in the chest many times” by the animal’s horribly stinky spray, he says. His wife makes him strip outside, but the smell has started to grow on him: “After a while, it starts to feel like perfume. To me, it’s got a sweet smell.”
The more he talks, the more my own relationship with nature begins to seem less like fear and more like a boundary dispute. I like animals; I just prefer that they conduct their business somewhere that doesn’t involve the structural integrity of where I sleep.
So maybe the question isn’t how to keep nature away. The question is how to coexist with the animals around us without losing our minds, our garbage cans or our dignity.
Every animal here has a job. Unfortunately, several of those jobs involve sending you back inside.
Peter Arkle
Nature’s least respectful roommates
A quick field guide to the summer creatures most likely to treat your yard, porch, attic or bloodstream as shared space — and solutions for their wrath.
Ticks turn a perfectly nice walk in the woods into a full-body inspection with bad lighting. Think low. Thomas N. Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island’s TickEncounter Resource Center, says immature ticks often make first contact at the feet, so use a permethrin clothing-treatment spray on shoes, tall socks and lower pant legs. Look for 0.5 percent permethrin on the label, and let your footwear and clothes dry before putting them on.
Mosquitoes ruin dusk. Eva Buckner, a University of Florida mosquito expert, says mosquitoes can develop in as little as a bottle cap’s worth of water, so empty your flowerpots, buckets, toys, pet bowls and birdbaths regularly. Use an EPA-registered repellent, and put a fan on the porch (mosquitoes are lousy pilots).
Biting flies go for the face, and they chase movement. Wear long sleeves, pants and light colors. Sarah Hughson, an insect/arthropod diagnostician with Michigan State University Plant & Pest Diagnostics, says repellents help but don’t create a “force field,” so insects may still land before giving up. When flies are awful, a mesh head net becomes reasonable. It’s fashion under protest.
Yellow jackets and wasps turn outdoor meals into hostage negotiations over lemonade. Cover your food and trash. Nicole Bell, a pollinator specialist with UMass Extension, says wasps are useful predators and pollinators, but picnic leftovers are an invitation. If a nest is away from foot traffic, note it and avoid it. If you see one near a door, deck or grill, call a professional, especially if anyone in your group has a sting allergy.
Mice and rats treat homes like seasonal rentals and never pay the cleaning fee. Remove food, water and shelter. Niamh M. Quinn, a human-wildlife interactions adviser with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, says people often trap animals without fixing their means of entry. Store food securely, trim vegetation away from buildings and seal gaps around doors, vents, pipes, roofs and foundations.
Raccoons have hands, confidence and no respect for your trash schedule. Stop feeding them. Rachael E. Urbanek, professor of wildlife ecology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, says the top mistake is feeding, whether directly or indirectly. Secure your garbage, bring pet food inside, clean your grills and understand that bird feeders may also feed half the neighborhood’s food chain.
Skunks dig for grubs, wander under porches and make dogs believe they’ve met an exciting new friend. Remove food sources and block access after the animal leaves. Keep garbage covered, clean up pet food, leash dogs at night, and don’t corner the skunk unless your evening plans include apologizing to everyone in the house.
Bats are terrific insect-eaters until one is making loops around the guest room. Don’t handle it. Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, recommends “exclusion, not extermination.” If a bat is inside, open your windows and doors and let it leave. If bats are roosting in the house, call a licensed wildlife exclusion operator. Don’t seal entry points in late spring or summer, when pups may be trapped inside.
Opossums look like they could solve a tick problem, which is how the internet got us all emotionally attached to the idea of a marsupial night janitor. Admire them, but don’t hire them. LaBonté says the opossum tick-control myth spread because people want to believe that “every ecological problem has an ecological solution.” Feeding opossums can also attract raccoons, foxes and coyotes, which is a bad trade unless your goal is to open a woodland food court.
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