If you’ve heard scratching in your attic, found droppings on your deck, or watched a raccoon disappear under your shed in the last few weeks — you’re not alone. Late April through July is the busiest stretch of our year, not because we’re doing the most removals, but because it’s the season we have to turn the most calls down.
This post explains why. It also explains exactly what you can — and should — do right now if you have wildlife in your home, even though most full removals can’t legally happen until the babies are mobile.
What’s happening in Ontario homes May through July
Across Grey, Bruce, and Huron Counties, every species we work with is raising young somewhere in or near a house, barn, attic, deck, or shed. The timing is roughly:
- Bats: maternity colonies form in late April and early May; pups stay flightless for six to eight weeks
- Raccoons: kits are born late March through May; they stay in the den for eight to twelve weeks
- Skunks: kits are born late April through early June; they stay in the den for six to eight weeks
- Squirrels: the spring litter (eastern grey and red squirrels) starts emerging in March-April and is mobile by late May
That overlap means almost any home with active wildlife in late May has babies inside. And that changes everything about how — and when — we can do the work.
Bats: maternity season is the strictest restriction
Bats in Ontario are protected under the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, and the little brown bat is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. What that means in practice: from early May through early August, exclusion work on an active bat colony is illegal in this province.
The biology is the reason for the law. A maternity colony is essentially a nursery — flightless pups clinging to mothers or roosting nearby for the six to eight weeks before they can fly on their own. The standard humane-exclusion method uses one-way valves that let bats leave the structure but prevent them from re-entering. If we install those during maternity season, the mothers leave to feed at dusk, can’t get back in to nurse, and the pups starve inside the wall or attic.
Beyond it being illegal, it’s the wrong thing to do. We don’t perform bat exclusion during maternity season, full stop. Read more about our bat removal process.
Raccoons: mother and kits cannot be separated
Raccoon work isn’t seasonally restricted by statute the same way bat work is, but the practical and ethical constraint is just as firm: if there are kits in the den, we will not separate them from the mother.
Raccoon kits born late March through May spend eight to twelve weeks in the den before they’re mobile enough to follow mom on foraging trips. If we install a one-way device during that period, the mother leaves to forage and can’t return. Kits without a mother in an Ontario spring will not survive — and even if they did, separating a denning raccoon family is something Ontario’s wildlife regulations explicitly discourage.
Our approach when we get a spring raccoon call: we inspect, document the access point, write the quote, and schedule the actual exclusion for the moment the kits are mobile (typically late May to mid-June, depending on when the litter was born). In a small number of cases — usually when the den is somewhere structurally damaging like inside a chimney or wall cavity — we’ll do hands-on relocation of the family together. That requires more time, more care, and a different price point, but it keeps mother and kits together. More on raccoon removal.
Skunks: same constraint, smaller window
Skunks have a tighter timeline. Kits are born late April through early June and stay in the den six to eight weeks. By late June or early July, most spring skunk dens are empty or nearly empty.
The same ethical constraint applies. We will not exclude a mother skunk from a den with non-mobile kits. If a skunk has dug under your deck or shed, we’ll come out, identify the den, and either schedule the exclusion for late June, or — if the issue is intolerable now (smell, threat to pets) — discuss the small set of options available for hands-on removal. More on skunk removal.
Squirrels: a brief window of higher difficulty
Eastern grey and red squirrels have two litters per year in Ontario: one in late winter (born February-March) and one in late summer (born July-August). The spring litter is mostly mobile by late May, so the squirrel-baby restriction is shorter than the bat or raccoon equivalents.
That said: from early March through mid-May, an active attic squirrel population almost certainly includes nest babies. We treat squirrel work the same way — inspect, document, schedule the exclusion for after the babies are mobile, or arrange hands-on family relocation when waiting isn’t an option. More on squirrel removal.
What you CAN do during baby season
The good news: there’s a lot you can do right now even if the actual exclusion has to wait.
Schedule the inspection now. We do free inspections year-round. We’ll identify every entry point on the home, identify the species, and give you a written quote. Booking the inspection in May means you have first pick of the post-season scheduling slots. By the time exclusion actually starts in late June or August, our calendar is full and homeowners who waited to call are looking at September or October.
Don’t try to seal entry points yourself. Sealing an active entry during baby season traps the mother, the babies, or both inside. If the mother gets trapped indoors, she’ll find her way into living space looking for an exit. If the babies get trapped, you have a much worse cleanup problem than you started with. Wait, and we’ll do it properly when the timing is right.
Don’t use ultrasonic repellents, mothballs, scent sprays, or bright lights. None of these work for any of the four species we deal with. Some of them push wildlife deeper into the structure (bats into wall cavities, raccoons into chimneys), which makes the eventual removal harder.
Document what you’re seeing. A photo of droppings, a video of a raccoon entering the soffit at dusk, a note about which corner of the attic the scratching comes from — all of this saves time during inspection and gives us a head start on identifying the species and the access point.
If a single bat ends up inside your living space, contain it to one room, open a window, and let it leave on its own. Don’t try to handle it bare-handed. If anyone in the household was sleeping in the same room as the bat, contact your doctor or local public health for assessment — bat bites can be small enough not to wake a sleeping person, and the precautionary protocol matters even though the actual rabies risk is small.
When the work actually happens
For most of our spring inspections, the exclusion is scheduled for one of three windows:
- Late June through July: raccoon, skunk, and squirrel exclusions where the spring litter has cleared
- Mid-August through October: bat exclusions, once maternity season ends
- November through March: bat-proofing on homes that don’t currently have bats, plus structural repair work that doesn’t require an active animal removal
Booking in May or June for an August exclusion is normal. Booking in mid-July for August often means you’re scheduled for September. The earlier you call, the better your scheduling options.
Why we work this way
A real humane-exclusion specialist refuses jobs the wrong contractor will take. There are still operators in Ontario who will install a one-way device on an active maternity colony in June, charge for it, and leave the trapped young to starve in your wall — because the homeowner is desperate and the contractor is cash-flow focused.
Our team has been doing this long enough across Grey, Bruce, and Huron to know that the cost of doing the job correctly is always lower than the cost of doing it twice — once cheap and wrong, once properly to fix what the first contractor caused. Every job we do is built around that math.
If you have wildlife in your home this spring, get in touch. We’ll come out, identify what you have, walk you through what needs to happen and when, and give you a written quote. No pressure, no obligation, no rushing the timing in ways that hurt the animals or the home.
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