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Published on: 4/4/2004
Last Visited: 11/22/2005
Mike Hurley.
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Mike Hurley and Larry Nibert have pushed past the lost tennis balls and scattered leaves that litter the top of a Fredericksburg building.
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Office workers inside have been rattled by scratching sounds coming from the attic, and Hurley and Nibert have been called in to catch the culprit--possibly a squirrel.
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Hurley heads back down to scour the structure at ground level: Solid brick.Sealed gutters.No entry points here.
He winds around to the building's wooden back, skims past a prickly holly bush and skirts the poison ivy that wraps around a spindly tree.
There, he finds what he's looking for--a hole no bigger than a golf ball, just large enough for a squirrel to squeeze through.
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Tracy rounds up the creatures Mike Hurley can't get to.
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Mike Hurley and Larry Nibert hoist a ladder.
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Mike Hurley, owner of ACS Wildlife and Snake Management, checks a client's rooftop in downtown Fredericksburg.Hurley surveys the area for nests built by animals or holes chewed in walls that would allow animals access.
Who ya gonna call?
Chasing squirrels is just one of the services Mike Hurley offers through his business, ACS Wildlife Removal.
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"These cold winter days when the squirrels don't want to come outside," Hurley said, "they're going to chew something."
Working on instinct
Catching critters is second nature to Hurley, who grew up in the Appalachian mountain town of Kincaid, W.Va.
"We hunted, fished, trapped animals," said Hurley, 32."That's what we did for fun."
When the stifled economy of his hometown drove him east to Spotsylvania, he found work in construction, then with the power company.
But when Hurley spotted a newspaper ad asking for a nuisance trapper in Northern Virginia, he knew he was the man for the job.
He sailed through his first assignments--catching the foxes that were preying on a breeder's Himalayan cats, and ridding a subdivision of the beavers whose activities were blocking its creek and flooding its yards.
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White introduced Hurley to some citified situations he hadn't encountered in West Virginia--birds in vents, raccoons in chimneys, geese on golf courses.Soon, Hurley branched out with his own Virginia franchise.
But would the Fredericksburg area need the services he had to offer?
"The first year, I'd pick up the phone, just to see if it was working," Hurley said."Now, we can't get it to stop ringing."
Cruisin' for critters
Hurley heads out each morning to confront a slew of house-dwelling creatures.
He carries homemade bait and clunky metal traps that clank in the back of his truck.He wears gloves to ward off the constant threat of bites and the worry of contracting rabies.
A full-face respirator lets him maneuver through attics, where insulation can make him sneeze and temperatures can soar to more than 100 degrees during the summer.
He uses a flexible fiber-optic telescope to find the nests animals build inside walls, and he wields a high-powered vacuum to suck up fecal matter and nesting materials.
And then there's Tracy.
"She's the most expensive piece of equipment we've got," said Hurley, who had the canine flown into Richmond International Airport from Hart Farms Kennels in Collierville, Tenn.
She's certified to hunt possums, groundhogs, foxes and other animals, and she loves her job.
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Weighing in at less than 10 pounds, Tracy wriggles into the small spaces, where Hurley could hardly hope to fit.She sniffs out nesting areas and animal carcasses, and chases pests into the traps Hurley sets.
Together, they have handled a gaggle of geese at Lake of the Woods, a raccoon crisis at Colonial Beach and a squirrel infestation in Fairfax, as well as other wildlife emergencies.
Recently, Hurley began chasing away the birds that flutter around the rafters at stores like Lowe's and Wal-Mart.
"Some jobs you can finish up in a day or two," said Hurley, who works as many as 16 hours a day for himself, and is employed full-time at General Electric."Some jobs, you've really got your hands full."
Once business started booming, Hurley hired Nibert, a childhood friend from Kincaid.
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"I would like to say I could handle all of Fredericksburg's critters by myself," Hurley said, "but the animal problem here is much more real than people think."
To free or not to free
Hurley tries to handle the wildlife he stalks as humanely as possible.Whenever he can, he performs "exclusions," where he chases pests from structures, then patches any holes that could allow them to come back in.
Sometimes, though, he's forced to trap them, and state regulations require trapped animals to be euthanized.
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