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Clintonville · Wildlife

Wildlife Removal & Exclusion in Clintonville, WI

BugBoss does wildlife work out of Clintonville itself — bats, raccoons, squirrels, skunks and the rest — including the two halves most companies split up: getting the animal out, and then sealing and cleaning the building so the next one cannot move in. The village's older housing stock, with its deep attics and original soffit runs, is why there is so much of this work here.

Clintonville is home base for BugBoss — our storefront sits at 600 S. Main St., so a Clintonville call is a same-town response, not a truck dispatched from an hour away in the Fox Valley.

Wildlife work in Clintonville is exclusion work, not a spray. On a mix of century-old downtown homes, mid-century neighborhoods, and farm properties on the edge of town, animals get into attics, chimneys, soffits, barns, and crawlspaces — and the only lasting fix is to remove them and seal the structure. BugBoss does both, and handles the DNR-regulated bat work most companies out here won’t take on.

What BugBoss handles in Clintonville

  • Bats — humane, DNR-compliant exclusion and guano cleanup
  • Raccoons, squirrels, and skunks in attics, chimneys, and outbuildings
  • Groundhogs, moles, voles, snakes, and woodpeckers
  • Permanent exclusion — sealing every entry point
  • Cleanup and decontamination

Why there is so much of this work in Clintonville

The village has exactly the housing stock wildlife wants. Century-old homes with deep attics, generous original soffit runs, and rooflines that a hundred Wisconsin winters have quietly opened up. Add mature trees along the Pigeon River giving squirrels a route onto the roof, and farm outbuildings on the edge of town giving everything a place to overwinter, and the result is steady wildlife work in a village of a few thousand people.

The other reason is supply. Most pest control companies — including the metro franchises that occasionally route a truck through here — do not do wildlife at all. They will treat insects and rodents and refer an animal in a wall out to somebody else, or to nobody. Out here there frequently is nobody else, which is why BugBoss does both halves.

Removal is the easy part. The building is the job.

Almost every wildlife call arrives as a request to take an animal out of a building, and almost every one of them is really a request to close a hole.

Trap tonight’s raccoon and the torn soffit it climbed through is still open next week. So is the gap at the fascia the squirrels will find in October, the same joint the wasps will build in next July, and the opening every cluster fly and lady beetle on the property will use in September.

One repair closes all of it. That is why what we sell is not really removal — it is getting the animals out, closing the building, and cleaning up what got left behind.

The animals, and how to tell them apart before anyone climbs

The time of day the noise happens does most of the identification.

  • Dawn and dusk, scratching and a rolling sound, silence overnight — gray squirrels. They are strictly daytime animals, and the rolling is an acorn being moved across the joists.
  • After dark, heavy and deliberate, with dragging — raccoons. If it sounds like a person is up there, it probably is one of these. The most destructive of the group and the one most likely to injure someone; do not go up.
  • Fast, light, constant, at night, in walls as well as overhead — mice.
  • Squeaking and a dry rustle at dusk, from a wall or soffit, with staining at an exterior gap — bats.
  • A smell and no noise at all — something died in a void. Blow flies in the living space are usually how people find out.

We wrote the longer version of this up here: reading the noise before you call anyone.

Bats: the calendar is not optional

Wisconsin protects its bats, and exclusion is prohibited during the summer maternity season while flightless pups are in the roost. Sealing a roost then kills the pups inside the structure — illegal, inhumane, and a considerably worse problem for the homeowner than the colony was.

So a bat call in June gets an inspection, a full plan, and a booked date rather than immediate work. We would rather tell you that and lose the momentum than do the job wrong. The detail is in our Wisconsin bat exclusion law guide and the post on why you cannot evict bats in June and July.

Native woodpeckers and most native birds are separately protected under federal law, which means the toolkit for a woodpecker on your siding is deterrence, exclusion, insect control and repair — never removal.

The Clintonville job that shows the whole shape of it

A colony of over 150 bats was living in the attic of a house in this village.

We evicted the colony, sealed the building against re-entry, stripped out the contaminated insulation, sanitized the space, and reinsulated it. The eviction was the beginning of the job rather than the end of it — a cleaned, sealed attic is neither attractive nor accessible to the next colony, and residual roost scent is an active invitation if you leave it.

Full write-up: a 150-bat colony evicted, and the attic put back together.

What a job runs through

  1. Inspect from outside first. The entry is found by reading the roofline and the sign around it, not by starting in the attic. There is usually more than one, and the ones nobody found are why a first attempt fails.
  2. Identify species and season — which decides what is legal and what is humane.
  3. Get them out, usually with one-way devices, so the animal leaves to forage and cannot return.
  4. Confirm the space is empty before anything is closed.
  5. Exclude properly — hardware cloth and flashing, mechanically fastened, not foam in a hole. The whole roofline, not the one opening.
  6. Clean up what needs it, and say honestly what does not.

Also in Clintonville

Something in the attic or barn in Clintonville? Call Brian — don’t corner the animal.

Call 866-BUGBOSSAbout wildlife service →

Wildlife Removal in Clintonville: FAQs

There is something in my attic right now. What should I do first?

Note the time of day it is active before you do anything else, because that identifies the animal better than anything you would see up there. Scratching and rolling at dawn and dusk with silence overnight is squirrels. Heavy, deliberate thumping after dark is a raccoon. Fast light skittering at night is mice. Squeaking and rustling at dusk from a wall or soffit is bats. Then call — and do not go up to look, particularly if it might be a raccoon or bats.

Can you evict bats from a Clintonville attic?

Yes, and it is a substantial part of what we do here — the village has a lot of the older, deep-attic housing bats prefer. Wisconsin protects its bats, so exclusion is by one-way devices rather than trapping, and it is prohibited during the summer maternity season while flightless pups are in the roost. That means a June call gets an inspection and a booked date rather than immediate work. Sealing then would kill the pups inside your ceiling, which is illegal and a far worse problem than the colony.

Why can't I just seal the hole once they leave?

Because of timing and because of young. Seal an entry in spring or early summer and you very likely lock a mother out and her non-mobile young in, which is inhumane and leaves you with an odor and fly problem inside the insulation for months. Seal a raccoon in at any time of year and it will make a new hole — through soffit, drywall, or ductwork. The space has to be confirmed empty first, which is most of what a proper job is.

Do you do the cleanup, or just the removal?

Both, and the cleanup is frequently the larger job. A raccoon latrine or an established bat roost contaminates and compacts insulation across a wide area, which is a health consideration and a thermal one — soiled, matted insulation has lost most of its R-value. We remove it, sanitize, and reinsulate. We also say plainly when it is not needed: a squirrel that used one corner for three weeks does not need a full attic restoration, and you should be wary of a quote for one written before anybody looked.

Is it legal to trap and move an animal somewhere else?

Wisconsin regulates the taking and relocation of wild animals, and the rules differ by species and by whether the animal is causing damage. Rather than paraphrase current regulation on a pest control website, we will tell you what applies to your specific situation, and you can check the current position with the Wisconsin DNR. In practice the question often does not arise, because a one-way door lets the animal leave on its own and simply not return.

Will a repellent or an ultrasonic device work?

No. Ultrasonic devices have not been shown to drive wildlife out of a structure, and animals habituate to noise and light within days. Mothballs and ammonia in an attic push fumes down through the ceiling into your bedrooms and do not reliably move anything. Every dollar spent there is a dollar not spent on the exclusion that actually ends it.

How much of this is repair work?

Often most of it. Getting an animal out is frequently the quick part; closing a roofline properly with hardware cloth and flashing, repairing the soffit and fascia the animal or the ice dams tore up, and rescreening vents is where the labor is. It is also what decides whether you are doing this again in two years, so we quote the whole job rather than the removal alone.

How fast can you get here?

The shop is at 600 S. Main St., so Clintonville is a same-town call. Wildlife work is not usually an emergency in the sense of needing somebody in the next hour — the exception is an animal loose inside the living space, or a bat in a room where someone was sleeping, both of which we treat as urgent. Say so when you call.

Got a pest or wildlife problem? Talk to Brian.

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