Pests of The Season

WINTER

Despite the cold, a host of vertebrate pests may be active outdoors as well as indoors (in attics, soffits, wall voids, garages, open crawlspaces or sub-slab cavities). These include house sparrows, starlings, pigeons (our three species of unprotected nuisance birds), raccoons, opossums (during brief warm-ups), tree squirrels, house mice, deer mice, and shrews. Moles remain active near the surface of lawns and planting beds as long as the ground is not frozen. Meadow voles readily chew networks of ruts in lawns to gather vegetation to eat and with which to construct nests in their subterranean burrows, even when the ground is covered by a thick blanket of snow.

Some pests, such as longhorned beetles, barklice (booklice), springtails and carpenter ants, may be carried indoors in firewood inadvertently. If unburned infested firewood is not replaced outdoors within several days, the warmed insects complete their pupation stage or simply reach their activity threshold and emerge from the logs, as though it were springtime.

Those pests which stealthily entered the structural voids of our homes/offices and workplaces during the fall months, in order to seek protection from winter, may be stimulated to seek out and enter the warm, well-lighted living spaces/workspaces of structures, instead of exiting outdoors, on unusually warm, sunny winter days.

These pests include mated female paper wasps, lady beetles (ladybugs), boxelder bugs, leaf-footed bugs, cluster flies, and blow flies.