Raccoons & squirrels
Raccoon & Squirrel Removal, Collingwood
Attics, soffits and chimneys. Humane removal with the babies accounted for, and a one-kilometre relocation limit that makes exclusion the only method that works.
Raccoons and grey squirrels both want the same thing from your house — a dry, defensible, warm cavity — and both are perfectly capable of making their own entrance to get it.
The one-kilometre rule, and why it matters to you
Under Ontario's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, an animal trapped in these circumstances must be released within one kilometre of where it was captured. There is no legal option to drive a raccoon out to the county and leave it there, and anyone telling you they will is either breaking the law or not doing what they said.
That has a practical consequence that decides the whole approach: a relocated raccoon is a local raccoon, and it knows the way back. Trapping on its own therefore does not solve anything — you remove one animal and the vacancy, and the hole, are still there. Exclusion and repair is the part that actually ends the problem, and trapping is at most a step within it.
Babies
Raccoon kits arrive in spring, and a very large share of our attic calls between March and June involve a female that has chosen your roof as a den. Excluding the mother and leaving the litter is both inhumane and self-defeating: she will do a great deal of damage trying to get back in, and if she does not succeed you have a dead litter in the ceiling.
The correct method is to locate the nest, remove the kits by hand, and place them in a heated reunion box at the entry point so the mother relocates them herself to one of her alternate dens. It takes longer, it costs more, and it is the only version that works.
Where they get in around here
| Entry | Typical property | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Roof–soffit intersection | Any roofline with a valley meeting a wall | The most common raccoon entry we find |
| Plumbing mast and vent boots | Newer subdivision builds | Squirrels widen a small gap quickly |
| Uncapped chimney | Older Collingwood and Thornbury housing | Classic raccoon den site |
| Gable and attic vents | Chalets with complex rooflines | Screens fail from the inside out |
| Rotted fascia | Anything with a long-standing gutter problem | Squirrels chew soft wood readily |
| Deck and shed skirting | Shoreline and seasonal property | Denning rather than roof access |
Chalets and part-time occupancy
A property that is empty five days a week is attractive for the obvious reason: nothing disturbs them. The escarpment properties we attend frequently have a colony well established before anybody notices, because the noise overhead only registers when somebody happens to be sleeping there on the right night. If you own a property up here that you visit rather than live in, an annual roofline inspection is worth considerably more than it costs.
What we will not do
We will not exclude a female away from a litter, we will not relocate outside the legal distance, and we will not seal a roof without confirming what is still inside it. All three are faster and cheaper. All three produce a dead animal in your ceiling and a call back to us in a fortnight.
Talk to a Collingwood pest control company
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.