Wildlife Pests vs. Gardeners: How to Find the Balance

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb Oregon State University Extension’s Wildlife Specialist, Dr. Dana Sanchez, joins host Erin Hoover to discuss strategies for managing vertebrate pests, or wildlife, in your garden and surrounding areas. She talks about common vertebrate pests such as voles, moles, gophers and ground squirrels, and offers solutions on fencing strategies to keep them out of your garden. She also covers what to do about larger animals such as deer if they are becoming pests.

Dr. Sanchez goes over legal and ethical considerations when managing wildlife and talks about common protected species and how that protection works. She gives alternatives to relocation or lethal control for listeners who might be dealing with some pesky wildlife. 

She ends the episode by discussing the controversies around feeding vertebrate pests and gives suggestions on how to strike a balance between protecting our gardens and supporting the wildlife around us, before sharing when and how to reach out for help for managing vertebrate pests.

• Manage Wildlife Conflicts in Your Home and Garden
• Rabbit & Hare Management in Washington Home Yards & Gardens (Home Garden Series)
• Living with wildlife
• Hiring a Wildlife Control Operator
• Pests, Predators, and Prevention: Integrated Pest Management for Vegetable Gardens

[00:00:00] Erin Hoover: Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb, your go-to podcast for up-to-date research-based horticulture and environmental stewardship knowledge to help you grow and manage your garden. Produced by Washington State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteers and brought to you by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

[00:00:16] I’m your host, Erin Hoover, a WSU Extension Master Gardener since 2015 and a certified permaculture designer and modern homesteader.

WSU Master Gardener volunteers are university-trained community educators who have been cultivating plants, people, and communities since 1973. Are you ready to grow? Let’s dig into today’s episode.

[00:00:45] Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb episode 44.

My guest today is Dr. Dana Sanchez, who conducts research on native wild animals, their habitats, and management. As Oregon State University Extension’s wildlife specialist, she promotes sustainable management of Oregon’s wildlife through daily interactions with Oregonians ranging from Ask Extension inquiries and delivery of educational presentations and products to collaborative need-based applied research projects conducted with public agencies, agricultural producers, and communities.

[00:01:21] Dr. Sanchez, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Dana Sanchez: Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure.

Erin Hoover: So today we’re talking about vertebrate pests, which most people are probably often called wildlife. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do with Oregon State University?

[00:01:40] Dr. Dana Sanchez: I sure can.

[00:01:41] Um, I’m a professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University. And the other title I hold is the Extension Wildlife Specialist.

Common Vertebrate Pests

[00:01:53] Erin Hoover: So what are some of the more common vertebrate pests that home gardeners might have in the Pacific Northwest?

[00:02:00] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Well, voles get mentioned an awful lot.

[00:02:03] We have vole issues, particularly here in the Willamette Valley, but more broadly, I would say what I categorize as the diggers. So voles, moles, gophers, and sometimes ground squirrels, depending where people are. And then, of course, deer often hit the top of the list as well.

[00:02:24] Erin Hoover: I know, uh, especially along the coast here, the deer are a real problem.

How to Apply Integrated Pest Management Principles Against Vertebrate Pests

[00:02:29] Uh, so how can gardeners apply integrated pest management principles to managing wildlife in their gardens?

[00:02:36] Dr. Dana Sanchez: In the ideal case, when we move into a new home, uh, or a new property, whatever we’re using that property for, getting the lay of the land and understanding what animals might already be resident using that habitat and considering that against how we’re going to use the property.

[00:02:56] So for example, you’re saying about home gardeners. So, we know that we’re going to want to be growing plants, uh, that are highly desirable. They might have fruits or vegetables. They might or might not be in raised beds, things like that. Trying to anticipate what conflicts could be arising. And part of that could be just talking to the neighbors.

[00:03:20] What animals have you seen or encountered in this area? When we can anticipate a potential conflict and then prevent it either by, for example, putting up a fence that fits the size of the animal we’re trying to exclude or putting that hardware cloth underneath our raised bed. So nothing can pop up in the middle of it from below.

[00:03:41] If we can, anticipate those issues and manage them before a conflict erupts. That’s our best-case scenario. We often don’t get to do that. So at that point, also, if a conflict is already going on, getting an accurate species ID is really important because all of our potential tools and approaches really do depend on knowing exactly who is involved.

[00:04:14] It’s not uncommon at all, for example, I mentioned the diggers. It’s not at all uncommon for those species to get mixed up with each other. And so doing the diagnosis to know who we’re actually dealing with is a core IPM principle we need to apply in any of those situations.

Gardening Practices to Discourage Pests in the Garden

[00:04:36] Erin Hoover: Are there specific gardening practices that can help discourage wildlife from the garden?

[00:04:43] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Exclusion is going to be the, um, most enduring, uh, enforceable and effective type of practice we can use around those high-value areas or crops or, or even individual plants.

And again, that really does how much we have to invest in or how we design that really does depend on what animal we are attempting to exclude, so for the diggers our “fences” need to extend below ground and be unchewable and diggable and that’s uh something that we can do. Uh, it does take a little bit more investment in sweat equity and materials, but it can be done effectively.

It’s not unusual for me to talk with folks who are in a setting where they need to fence out the raccoons, the deer, and also one or more of the diggers.

[00:05:45] And it’s like, okay, let’s talk about how to make your fence effective at all those different levels and to match the abilities of all of those animals.

Strategies for Excluding Deer from Gardens

[00:05:58] Erin Hoover: For moles and voles, you talked about putting hardware cloth or, you know, and other ways to exclude them from your, uh, beds. So what are some of the ways that we might exclude deer?

Other than, I mean, fencing, I know is probably the biggest one.

[00:06:11] Dr. Dana Sanchez: And fencing can take different, uh, forms. Uh, there are people, for example, who are using a front yard and really don’t want to put up, or may even be barred by regulations from putting up a deer-proof solid fence, but they could look into something that, uh, like a water scarecrow that blasts animals that trigger.

[00:06:37] That only works obviously when we can run water out there. So if you’re in a spot that gets hard freezes, that’s not going to be effective in the winter. It’s not going to be something you want to do. And it also has to be used with great care. When we are talking about urban and suburban spaces and blasting things with jets of water, we really have to make sure that that’s not going to be the neighbors or the delivery person.

[00:07:05] Or even members of our own family, so there are other approaches to fencing out deer, for example, and tools like that can also be really helpful, even for neighbors, free-ranging cats, or for turkeys, if you have those in your neighborhood and things like that. But then, the most year-round, uh, enduring exclusion is going to be a fence that can’t be jumped.

[00:07:36] Sometimes we do add a single electric line. Sometimes people choose to use what’s called, uh, electrified poultry netting for other, often, use that if it’s something that you need to exclude from temporarily, uh, maybe not something that you want as your year-round multiyear solution.

[00:08:03] Erin Hoover: Yeah, I can attest to the, um, the water, uh, sprinklers for the deer.

[00:08:09] We had one and it. We didn’t realize how far it shot, and it shot into our neighbor’s driveway. And we live rurally, but there were neighbor’s horses, where they were riding horses down the driveway. And it’s the water spooked the horses. Oh dear. So yeah, we took it down after that because I felt bad about spooking the horses.

Legal and Ethical Considerations when Managing Wildlife Conflicts

[00:08:28] But something to consider. Can you talk a bit about the legal and ethical considerations to be aware of when managing wildlife conflicts?

[00:08:37] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Yeah, I can only do that briefly because there are a lot of regulations in the United States. We have state agencies that are legally mandated to manage wildlife populations on behalf of not just the current members of our state, for example, Oregon with the state of Washington, but their mandate is to sustainably manage in perpetuity.

[00:09:04] So there are timelines and there are approaches to management that are going to be very different. They’re going to be population-based rather than individual animal based and most of the people I get to encounter in my work as an extension specialist best know animals through our relationships with our pets or even livestock. You mentioned horses being owned, things like that where the management of the individual is really the prime focus.

[00:09:38] Whereas wildlife populations are managed at a much broader, as I mentioned, that long sustainable focus. A key part of that management on behalf of the public, it’s called the public trust doctrine, is that wildlife don’t belong to individual private humans, they belong to the people. So. It’s those types of principles that guide decision-making.

[00:10:08] And they also have to guide what we do, even though we are seeing from our front window, our property, the animal moving through the property is something that we need to get help with from the mandated officials, uh, we can’t move animals, for example, beyond our own property lines. And so there are core considerations like that.

[00:10:37] Erin Hoover: I think that’s one of the things I’ve seen a lot, I don’t know, Facebook posts or whatever about, you know, how do I manage raccoons? And they’re like, oh, take it up in the woods. And it’s like that. That’s not the way it works.

[00:10:51] Dr. Dana Sanchez: It’s not the way it works, and people generally do that out of an abundance of wanting to do the kind of thing.

[00:10:59] What I often hear is, I don’t mind them being here, I want them to live happily somewhere else. But the honest truth is that when we take a wild animal out of the area in which it’s been living, it knows the escape routes, it knows where to find food, it has relationships that may, maybe shall we say peaceful or not so much with other animals in its own species, and we essentially dump it into a new place, the chances of it actually surviving are extremely low and the chances of it finding a quote, quick and humane and are even lower.

[00:11:32] And then finally, there’s the potential for transmitting diseases and disrupting the population of not just that species, but all the other species, wherever the animal gets dumped off and it’s illegal.

Common Protected Species

[00:12:03] Erin Hoover: Are there any particular species that are commonly encountered that would be, uh, considered protected species?

[00:12:11] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Well, there are various levels of protection. As I mentioned, the state management mandate covers native wildlife species. There are some species that have additional protections beyond that, such as any migratory birds that are protected under international treaties.

[00:12:33] And then there are a relatively few number of species that are actually covered under threatened and endangered status. But all native species have some level of, I guess we would call it protection, in that their management is mandated to the wildlife professionals in the state agency. Or the fisheries, uh, professionals in the state agency, as the case might be.

[00:12:59] There are non-native invasive species, unfortunately, where most of us live. Things like English house sparrows, uh, black rats, brown rats. And fortunately, here in Oregon, we don’t have as many now, but, uh, feral swine, uh, things like that, that simply don’t belong here.

They do damage, they damage the habitat, they can carry disease, they can do all kinds of damage, uh, depending on how many of them there are to private property, um, things like that, they do not fall under the same protections and management that we hold for our native species.

[00:13:41] We still shouldn’t move any of them though. I will say that is still barred from moving. Generally, if you have an animal that needs to, uh, be quote removed from a property, that means a lethal removal. Whether you do it or you pay a professional to do that.

Spring Plant Sale Reminder

[00:14:06] Erin Hoover: I wanted to take a quick break to remind you that spring is just around the corner, and this means that it’s time for the WSU Extension Master Gardener plant sales across Washington. These plant sales are the perfect place to find healthy, locally grown plants, including vegetables, perennials, natives, and more, all while supporting research-based gardening education in your community.

[00:14:27] Not sure where to find a sale near you? Visit your local WSU Extension Master Gardener website or check out the statewide event calendar, www.mastergardenerfoundation.org/overview/plant-sales. Whether you’re looking for the perfect addition to your garden or just wanna chat with knowledgeable gardeners, don’t miss out.

[00:14:47] Support your local master gardeners and grow something great this season.

Alternatives to Relocation or Lethal Control for Native or Protected Species

Erin Hoover: So for native species or protected species, what would some of the alternatives to relocation or lethal control be?

[00:15:04] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Well, I’ve mentioned exclusion already, depending on the conflict that is happening. Simply finding out how the animal is accessing whatever it is damaging.

[00:15:19] So that might be, for example, a flicker, which is one of our native bird species. And flickers get into trouble seasonally, because they like to get up on metal and other things and drum as part of their essentially dating advertisement that “I’m here, I’m looking for a mate”. In and of itself, drumming on your vent covers probably isn’t going to do great damage.

[00:15:49] But if that same animal or the mate it attracts decides that the siding on your house, uh, up under your eaves is where they want to excavate, instead of being able to find a tree, then there are steps we can take to once the bird has told us where it’s wanting to work, that we can use netting stretched to keep the bird from even being able to access that part of the house.

[00:16:20] So that’s one example of when an animal tells us very clearly that we’re about to have a conflict. That we can, uh, dissuade it from being able to do that. It just can’t access it. Uh, we’ve already talked about fencing above and below ground, um, and some of the alternatives to fencing. There are other things we can do if we’re inadvertently offering a resource that the animal has learned that is going to be there, we can remove that resource.

[00:17:00] Um, I would say that raccoons, skunks, sometimes possums, certainly coyotes, and, uh, even deer, for example, will learn that there’s either pet food or spilled or leftover food for owned animals.

Or even your bird feeder that they know there’s a really reliable source of high-value food and that turns into a central place that they’re going to visit and revisit and so if we are able to remove or reduce that resource for them the attraction and the frequency of use will also decrease over time, although we may have to help them break that habit, we may have to reduce the availability or remove the availability of that thing that is luring them in and then use a backup, then do some more vigilant scaring or things like that to say this is not only not a rich area for you, but it’s also not a very safe or pleasant place for you.

[00:18:15] Erin Hoover: Yeah, we put up a fence to exclude the deer because they were, you know, eating everything. But once we’ve fenced them out and excluded them, we realized that they were eating all the windfall apples. And so now we have to go out and clean them up to prevent disease in our apple trees. So there’s a fine line there between the damage they do and the help that they provide.

[00:18:39] Dr. Dana Sanchez: That’s a great example. And there’s always something like that. Apples are an especially good example of one of those foods where we see the deer eating them, but if we put a trail camera up, we might discover that we are being visited on a nightly basis by many other animals that we would rather not cross paths with.

[00:19:01] So, uh, because apples are one of those amazing superfoods, uh, and they smell good. So even we can smell them. Um, so it is a really good example of something rich and alluring that we can do through our own management. Reduce that potential for a conflict.

[00:19:24] Erin Hoover: I know this fall; I saw a lot on social media. There was controversy about putting your Halloween pumpkins out for wildlife.

Controversies Around Feeding Wildlife

[00:19:33] Can you talk about some of the controversies of feeding wildlife?

[00:19:37] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Well, I think there are parts of two different issues there. What the pumpkin issue, um, part of that is that some people paint their pumpkins. Or they apply glitter or things like that. The animal shouldn’t be eating. Another issue is that they’re sometimes kept so long that they’ve begun to mold and rot.

[00:19:59] And similarly, we wouldn’t want to expose any animal, uh, to those sorts of, uh, things to ingest wildlife feeding in general. We have to be mindful that, although we tend to do it so, because we enjoy watching and observing the beautiful animals, whether it’s birds or deer or whatever, and by having a reliable source of food, we know that we get to see them.

[00:20:30] Uh, so it’s a viewing opportunity. The flip side of that is that the animal is learning that there’s a food resource there, and it’s going to come back even after the pumpkin is long gone, potentially.

[00:20:55] Um, and the other concern for wildlife health is that we get animals to come and congregate around artificial sources of food that tend to be richer, more dense, more reliable in terms of that specific location. So we get more animals of the same species all coming and sharing airspace and defecating and potentially having, you know, animal-on-animal conflicts. They are also more likely to start ignoring the other risks to them.

[00:21:26] Uh, they will also, the, the human and wildlife health concern there is that while the animals might be trading disease or parasite organisms, they’re also starting to value that really rich resource and see it as theirs. So a person can then come along and be like, okay, shoot, you’ve had enough. And the wild animals like, no, actually this is mine.

[00:21:59] And I’m going to defend it against you or defend it against your dog or even your cat. Uh, so habituation is one of the types of learning through which wildlife wild animals lose their instinctive fear of human beings as being an apex predator. Uh, the other way that animals lose their instinctive fear of humans and all the things that we do.

[00:22:30] You know, the smells, the noises, the risks of other animals we have around us is through, uh, food conditioning. And when those two forms of learning are combined, is that nothing bad happens when I come near the human’s house or barn, and I’m also getting a food reward. That is very, very powerful in closing the gap between where an animal perceives a human or, again, one of our domestic animals, and the point at which the wild animal knows it needs to bug out and flee.

[00:23:11] It also increases that territorial or ownership type of, uh, sense that the wildlife has over that space and that particular food resource in this exam. But wild animals are still wild animals. And when push comes to shove, if they decide they don’t have enough time and space to flee then they will turn to defense, which if we, or a dog, or a cat, or whatever, are experiencing, it looks a lot like an attack, and it can be very, very dangerous.

How to Strike a Balance Between Protecting Gardens and Supporting Wildlife

[00:23:56] Erin Hoover: So what advice would you have for gardeners who want to strike a balance between protecting their gardens and supporting local wildlife?

[00:24:04] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Well, I think a lot of the things we’ve already talked about. Anticipating, noticing what’s in the neighborhood already, who else are you sharing the neighborhood with in terms of the feathered, the furred, the hooved, and things like that?

[00:24:19] And anticipating where those potential conflicts could be coming from and deciding how am I going to manage my garden or my yard to provide refuge and safe sources of food for perhaps the smaller animals, like birds, songbirds that. I can coexist within a relatively short space without having a lot of conflicts between us without offering a quiet invitation to animals that I am not going to be comfortable sharing my space with

When to Seek Help for Vertebrate Pest Management

[00:24:58] Erin Hoover: Alright, so if a gardener is overwhelmed by a persistent issue, when should they seek help from a professional or from an extension service?

[00:25:08] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Yeah, I think talking with your Master Gardeners, um, who have had some training on vertebrate pest management, and especially if it is, what we call a game animal. If this is an animal species that is regularly hunted, such as deer, that’s an excellent and really important time to reach out to your state Fish and Wildlife agency and ask for contact information for what’s probably called a district biologist.

[00:25:40] That’s their title here in Oregon, and district biologists are assigned as it sounds, like smaller parts of the state to work with stakeholders in identifying and managing wildlife, not just conflicts, but also opportunities to support our native wildlife species. Uh, sometimes depending on the species, depending on the situation, it all depends.

[00:26:11] Of course, they may be on technical assistance, even be able to offer assistance. And maybe it’s going to be a workshop with a neighborhood to talk about a shared concern or a shared strategy on larger pieces of land. They may be even able to access some co-management or co-funding if resources or infrastructure or access are needed so your state wildlife district biologists can be another really important group of people to reach out to if we’re talking about some of the non-native invasive species. That’s when we need to consult with a private contractor such as a pest control company on the native species side, at least in the state of Oregon.

[00:27:03] We have what are titled Wildlife Control Operators who are private contractors who have undergone training and certification and then licensure by the State Fish and Wildlife Agency, and then they can, as their private business, run, um, services to homeowners, for example, for doing that wildlife exclusion work.

[00:27:31] If you know you have the bats up in a part of your attic, for example, that you just can’t reach with the tools you have, or you don’t have the time, which is understandable, or, or you need more people to help, things like that. A Wildlife Control Operator is a type of contractor you reach out to. Uh, again, that’s where contacting your state fish and wildlife agency to say, “Hey, I really need help removing the raccoon from our crawl space or excluding those bats or doing some of this work. Do you have a list of certified wildlife control operators?”.

[00:28:01] That’s a great reason to reach out to your state office. If you do contract either with a pest control company for the non-native species or a wildlife control operator, for the native species, it’s really important to realize these people are private businesspeople and they’re contractors and you’re asking them onto your private property. So, use all the same due diligence that you do before you have somebody come and replace your roof.

[00:28:44] Do you have good reviews? Can I see a free estimate of the scope of work and how much it will cost? Do you have insurance? Are you licensed? Things like that all the same things that we do in preparation for bringing a private business onto our property need to be done

Final Thoughts on Managing Vertebrate Pests in the Garden

[00:29:05] Erin Hoover: Okay. So do you have any final thoughts about managing wildlife in our gardens?

[00:29:12] Dr. Dana Sanchez: Well, I think that we as homeowners, yard owners, and gardeners have a great opportunity to help out native wildlife species, learning what native plants they use for food and cover. Uh, it can be a great opportunity to help support and perpetuate these beautiful animals in their systems, even though the landscape’s very challenging for them.

[00:29:41] So we can play our own parts to do that.

[00:29:45] Erin Hoover: Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I learned a lot about managing wildlife in our gardens. All right, thank you for the opportunity.

[00:30:00] Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, brought to you by the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteers and sponsored by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

[00:30:04] We hope that today’s discussion has inspired and equipped you with valuable insights to nurture your garden.

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