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.
If you call us about bats in July, we cannot exclude them, and no amount of paying us more will change that. Everything else about The Blue Mountains follows from two things happening in the same place: an escarpment that is natural bat habitat, and the tourism built on top of it.
Bats, and the window that is not ours to move
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. Worth saying plainly, because people take it personally and they should not: this is a traffic problem, not a cleanliness one. The best-kept properties on the hill are exactly as exposed as the worst.
For an operator the deciding factor is almost never the treatment cost. It is the downtime. A three to six week conventional program starting in February closes the calendar through the best part of the season; a heat treatment is back in service the same evening.
What discretion actually means on a rental property
We work unmarked and in plain clothing as standard here. A pest control van sitting in the driveway of a short-term rental is a business problem entirely separate from the insects, and a neighbour with a phone is all it takes. Nobody should have to ask us for that, so it is simply how we turn up.
The empty-building pattern
A great many properties up here are visited rather than lived in, and nothing disturbs a colony in a roof for weeks at a time. So raccoons, squirrels and bats all get thoroughly established before anybody registers the noise. It gets noticed when somebody happens to be sleeping in the right room on the right night, which is a matter of luck rather than vigilance.
Which is the argument for an annual roofline inspection on a part-time property. It is a small amount of money set against the thing it is protecting you from, and it is the single most useful hour anybody buys from us on the escarpment.
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.