Georgia wildlife control: A Complete Homeowner's Guide

What to look for

Soft wood is where raccoons pull and squirrels chew. Median home values around $345,000 across the state's cities sit on a lot of crawlspace construction and slab-on-grade ranches, and both give armadillos and opossums an easy target. The legal part is the permit. A Georgia wildlife control permit covers one property and one species for up to 90 days, carnivores cannot be relocated under it, and armadillos, coyotes and groundhogs can be taken as nuisances but not kept alive without one. Georgia also sits inside the USDA raccoon rabies bait zone that ends in Alabama. Georgia wildlife problems are subtropical problems: warm, wet and continuous. The state's cities run a median summer high near 89F and a median winter low near 33F, so there is no hard freeze to push everything indoors at once and no deep cold to end a den season. Raccoons and opossums use attics, chimneys and crawlspaces whenever it suits them, with a spring litter peak; big brown bats form maternity colonies in soffits and behind shutters from spring through summer; coyotes den at the edges of subdivisions; and armadillos, which Georgia DNR lists among the species its nuisance rules cover, dig for grubs along foundations and under slabs where the soil stays soft. The wet part makes the entries. About 52 inches of rain a year and humidity near 71% keep soffits, fascia and the wood in a vented crawlspace damp for most of the year.

• 1Shallow cone-shaped holes across the lawn and a trench along the foundation, the armadillo's grub hunt.
• 2Heavy footsteps overhead at dusk in any month, since Georgia raccoons do not den down for winter.
• 3Greasy brown staining on brick or siding below a soffit gap, with bat droppings on the sill below it by June.
• 4A sour smell from the crawlspace vents and a torn vapor barrier, the opossum's sign.
• 5A soffit panel hanging loose where 71% humidity softened the fascia behind it.
• 6Chirring or whimpering from the attic or a chimney in March or April, which means raccoon kits.
• 7Pet food vanishing from a carport at night, and a coyote or raccoon on the camera.
• 8Insulation shoved aside in a line across the attic, a raccoon's path to a favored corner.

Treatment options and typical costs

Prices are typical published ranges. Ask what’s included before you compare quotes.

How Georgia's 90-day wildlife control permit shapes the job.

Under it, carnivores cannot be relocated, which takes the truck ride to the countryside off the table for raccoons and coyotes. It is tied to one property and one species, so a house in Roswell with raccoons in the attic and an armadillo under the patio may need two. The permit lasts up to 90 days. Every paid wildlife job in Georgia runs on a permit from Georgia DNR, and the permit's terms explain most of what a provider will and will not do on your property. The answers should be quick and specific; a provider who has to think about it has not done many of these. When you compare two Georgia providers, ask each one which species the permit will name, who pulls it, whether the exclusion is scheduled inside the 90 days, and what happens to the animal. The 90-day clock matters more than it sounds: it means the trapping and the exclusion have to be finished inside one window, so a provider who sets a cage in week one and leaves the soffit open until week fourteen has run out of permit. Armadillos, coyotes and groundhogs may be taken as nuisances, but nobody may hold one alive without the permit, which is what makes the hardware-store cage a trap for the homeowner as much as the animal.

wildlife activity by season.

In Georgia, checking the foundation, gaps around doors and windows, and any moisture or clutter near the structure usually turns up the conditions that are letting them in. The most useful first step in Georgia is to note where you have seen wildlife and when they appear, because that timeline is what lets a provider focus on the right area instead of treating the whole property. Scheduling before the busy stretch, rather than after it, tends to mean faster service and a more accurate quote, and a local provider can point out the conditions that matter most in Georgia.

Why bats found in a Georgia attic in June wait until late August.

The blackout covers the maternity season. Georgia issues no bat permits from May 1 through August 15, and a homeowner in Augusta or Savannah who finds big brown bats behind the shutters in June needs to understand why the job cannot start that week. That is the cost of the blackout, and it is not the provider's fault. Georgia's 71% humidity means guano in an attic stays wet and heavy, so the cleanup line on a September quote reflects three extra months of it. What the homeowner can do is stay out of the attic, keep the bedroom doors closed at night, and note the date of any bat found in living space, because a bat in a room with a sleeping person is a question for the county health department, and bats are about 35% of rabid animals found nationally. What a provider can do in June is inspect, count the entries, photograph the staining, screen the gaps the colony is not using so the colony does not spread, and book the exclusion for the first days after August 15. So the state stops the permits. An exclusion during that stretch lets the adults out at dusk and locks the pups inside, where they die in an 89F attic and the smell tells you about it. Big brown bat colonies gather in warm soffits and attics in spring, and the pups born there cannot fly for weeks.

Armadillos: Georgia's foundation problem.

Inside a crawlspace the same digging undermines pier footings. The animal trenches along the footing, the trench collects water, and over a season the water works under the slab of a Columbus or Warner Robins ranch. Armadillos hunt grubs and earthworms in soft soil, and the wettest, softest soil on a Georgia lot is along the slab edge, the patio and the crawlspace skirting, where 52 inches of rain a year runs off the roof. What it does in Georgia is dig, and where it digs is the problem. An armadillo is not going to get into your attic, and it does not carry the rabies weight that raccoons do. If the digging is somewhere else on the lot, away from the house, many Georgia homeowners simply let it be. The cheapest prevention is a lawn without grubs, since an armadillo with nothing to eat along your slab goes next door. Then an L-shaped hardware cloth barrier goes a foot down along the foundation edge and bends outward, so the next armadillo hits mesh and gives up. A permitted provider sets cages along the trench with wing boards to funnel the animal in; Georgia lets armadillos be taken as nuisances but not held alive without a permit, so ask how the provider handles a catch. The fix has two halves.

What the first visit looks like at a Georgia crawlspace home.

The provider starts at the vents. A wildlife inspection on a crawlspace house in Macon or Athens spends as much time under the house as on the roof, because in Georgia the crawlspace is half the problem. A quote that is one number for one cage is a quote for a repeat customer. If kits are likely, which in Georgia is most of March through June, the report should say how they will be handled. The report should name each species found, say which permit covers it, mark the active entries and the secondary ones, list the rotted wood by length, count the vents to screen, and put the animal's disposition in writing, since Georgia's no-relocation rule for carnivores applies. Then the lawn edge for armadillo cones and trenches. Then the roofline: soft fascia, hanging soffit panels, uncapped flues and shutters with bat staining, all of them made worse by the 71% humidity. Inside the crawlspace they look for torn vapor barrier, droppings, a nest in the insulation between joists, and the smell that tells opossum from raccoon. A vented crawlspace has a dozen or more openings, and any vent with a torn screen or a rotted frame is an opossum or raccoon door; the inspector notes which ones are open and which have worn paths and hair.

Renters, landlords and who pulls the permit in Georgia.

On rabies, Georgia is in the eastern raccoon zone, and the CDC reports about 1.4 million exposure evaluations nationally each year; if a raccoon or a bat ends up in a tenant's living space, the county health department is the first call, made by whoever is standing there, and the lease has nothing to say about it. The permit's 90-day clock is worth explaining to tenants, because it means the exclusion has to be scheduled and the tenant has to allow access more than once. For landlords with several properties, one spring walkthrough of the soffits, vents and slab edges, done before the May 1 bat blackout, heads off the summer calls. A tenant in Atlanta or Sandy Springs who hears raccoons at dusk should send the landlord a dated email that names the sound and the time; in a state with no winter shutdown, the animal is still there in April with kits, and the date shows how long the owner knew. In a Georgia rental, the owner is nearly always the one who hires the provider and pays for the removal and the repair, because a rotted soffit, a broken crawlspace vent or an uncapped chimney is a condition of the building, and because the state's wildlife control permit is issued for the property, which makes it the property owner's paperwork.

A year in Georgia wildlife, month by month.

January and February: raccoons and opossums are active on 33F nights, using attics, chimneys and crawlspaces as weather cover rather than winter dens; coyotes pair up and start scouting den sites at subdivision edges. Georgia's wildlife calendar has no off switch, but it does have a rhythm, and the permit rules are written around it. A Georgia homeowner who does the roofline and vents in July and the barriers in October has covered the two halves of the year. December: back to the beginning, since nothing has frozen. September through November: bat exclusions, a second small wave of raccoon and opossum move-ins ahead of the winter rains, and the best window for capping chimneys and burying armadillo barriers before the ground gets soggy. August 15: bat permits resume, and the exclusion season opens. June through mid-August: 89F days, bat pups flightless, permits unavailable; this is the stretch for fascia carpentry and crawlspace vent screening, and for documenting the colony. May 1: the bat permit blackout begins, and big brown bat colonies fill soffits in Marietta, Kennesaw and Savannah alike. March through April: raccoon kits are born in attics and flues, the peak of the year for hand removals, and armadillo digging picks up as the soil warms.

Simple ways to keep wildlife away

• Replace rotted fascia and soffit in a dry stretch, since 52 inches of rain a year keeps them soft the rest of the time.
• Quarter-inch hardware cloth over every crawlspace vent, fastened into sound wood, not into rot.
• Bury an L-shaped mesh barrier a foot deep along slab edges and patios where armadillos have dug before.
• Cap every chimney; Georgia raccoons use flues as nurseries from March on.
• Feed pets indoors, especially in neighborhoods where coyotes and raccoons show up on cameras.
• Trim pines and oaks so no limb comes within eight feet of the roof edge.
• Check behind shutters and along the soffit in April, before the bat blackout starts on May 1, and book any exclusion for late August.
• Fix the grub problem in the lawn and the armadillos lose their reason to dig.

Questions people ask

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