Service area · The Blue Mountains
Pest Control in The Blue Mountains
Escarpment country: the strongest bat pressure in our area, complex chalet rooflines, and accommodation that receives a different party every few days all season.
The Blue Mountains is the most distinctive area we work in, and its two dominant problems both come from the same source — the escarpment itself and the tourism it generates.
Bats
The Niagara Escarpment is natural bat habitat: crevices, caves, rock faces and a great deal of old barn and outbuilding across the townships behind it. Put chalets with complicated multi-level rooflines in the middle of that and you have a lot of buildings offering exactly what a maternity colony wants.
The timing constraint governs everything here. Between roughly early June and late August a maternity colony contains flightless pups, and excluding the adults in that window traps the young inside the roof. Several Ontario bat species are protected under the Endangered Species Act, so this is a legal question as well as a humane one. Exclusion happens in spring before the pups, or from late August once the young are flying. If you call us in July, expect a containment now and a booked exclusion for the end of the month.
Rental turnover
A chalet hosting forty parties a season has forty opportunities to receive bed bugs, and it is a traffic problem rather than a cleanliness one — the best-kept properties are just as exposed. For an operator the decisive factor is almost never the treatment cost, it is the downtime: a three to six week conventional program in February closes the calendar through the best part of the season, where a heat treatment is back in service the same evening.
We work unmarked and in plain clothing as standard here, because a pest control van in the driveway of a rental property is a business problem quite separate from the insects.
The empty-building pattern
A great many properties on the escarpment are visited rather than lived in. Nothing disturbs a colony in a roof for weeks at a time, so raccoons, squirrels and bats all become well established before anyone registers the noise — it only gets noticed when somebody happens to be sleeping there on the right night. An annual roofline inspection on a part-time property is worth considerably more than it costs.
Booking work in The Blue Mountains
Tell us what you have actually seen and where, and roughly when it started. That is usually enough to say whether you are looking at something we should be at this afternoon, something that wants a booking, or something where the honest answer is to wait — bat exclusion in July being the clearest example of the last one.