When I started doing nuisance trapping years ago I really didn’t know what I was in for. In a small urban area surrounded by rurals it is really anything goes. I thought it would be mostly the usual animals that a fur trapper would run into in an urban setting, and for the most part it was, until I started getting my name out there and put out some advertisements. Raccoons and skunks started out being my big sellers, with beavers, squirrels and gophers coming in second. I also found that trapping wasn’t the only way to solve conflicts.
Birds were the worst for getting into places they couldn’t get out of. They would scratch and chirp and drive residents crazy, and I would be called to get them out. Those jobs required taking whatever vent or pipe they were trapped in apart and removing them by hand and letting them go. After the animal was rescued some sort of exclusion was installed to keep them out.
I once removed a mating pair of wood ducks from a metal stove chimney. They had descended to a horizontal piece of pipe and I had to take the whole chimney apart
