Thursday, March 28, 2024

A Wild Family Business: Nittany Valley Varmints makes critter capturing a two-generation job

What most people consider “family pastimes” doesn’t include scooping skunks out of window wells or stopping traffic on Atherton Street to rescue a brood of ducklings. But for the Richardsons, who run Nittany Valley Varmints (NVV) as a family, it’s all in a day’s work—literally. 

Brian Richardson, the company’s licensed nuisance wildlife controller, says the family business started “kind of by a fluke.”

Shortly after he and his wife, Kim, and their daughter, Zoe, moved to Happy Valley in 2013, friends of theirs had a problem with groundhogs under their shed and needed them to be removed. 

“I knew from where I grew up in New York, you had to have a license to do that type of thing, so l looked into it,” Brian says. 

Brian learned you have to pay $50 to take a test with the Game Commission and score at least 85 out of 100 questions. You can fail the test twice in a year, and then you can’t take it again for five years. 

Brian says when he asked the Game Commission, “What’s on it?” they said, “We don’t know, we don’t take it,” but he learned there is a 90-percent fail rate. 

“Well, I’ll just take it, and see if my hillbilly knowledge can pass it, and then if I don’t, I can at least find something to study, because I’ll at least know what’s on it,” Brian recalls thinking. “But luckily I passed it.”

That was 2015. Fast-forward roughly six years, and NVV is a regional wonder. 

“I thought, ‘Maybe I can make some beer drinking money catching five or six groundhogs a year,’ and then it just exploded, and I honestly don’t know how,” says Brian. “I had a full-time job, and my phone was just ringing off the hook, and I ended up quitting my full-time job and doing this full-time.

“I think the first year we caught 60-something animals, and we were like, ‘Oh man, that’s a lot!’” Brian says. “[For 2021], we’re at 683. It just shows you how quickly it’s blown up.”

The Richardsons make frequent use of social media, posting photos of the sometimes cute and sometimes terrifying skunks, raccoons, groundhogs, bats, squirrels, birds, and snakes they capture. They’ve also spread awareness of their work through a podcast, “Trapper and the Gang,” which involves interviews with other local small businesses and mixes humor and education for a show Kim says is “kid-friendly, laidback, and fun.” 

‘I like a skunk call’

Brian humbly says the reason NVV is so in-demand is because there aren’t a lot of options when it comes to wildlife removal. 

“There are only 22 game wardens in the whole state,” Brian explains. “Everyone else is a deputy, basically a volunteer. They help out when they can, but they’re not available all the time. Game wardens deal with deer and bear. I can’t touch them, but I deal with everything else.”

NVV has accumulated a long list of satisfied customers and positive testimonials, which are likely due to a few unique aspects of their company: The Richardsons are committed to live catch and relocation of animals. They’re on-call 24/7 for emergencies. They also repair damage the critters may have caused in a person’s house and do their best to seal entrances so varmints don’t re-enter a structure. 

“If it’s possible, and the animal’s healthy, we go out of our way to save every animal we can,” Brian says. “We have an extreme relationship with Centre Wildlife Care,” a wildlife rescue center in Port Matilda.

What’s more, the Richardsons make much of their work a family affair and seem to have a lot of fun doing it together. 

A day in the life 

“You never know when the phone rings, what you’re going to get into,” Kim says.

“Our calendar has nothing to do with months of the year,” says Brian. “It’s what animals are causing problems.”

From December through February, for instance, the Richardsons are mainly dealing with squirrels. Then, raccoon babies are born. In March and April, it’s skunks. And in May through June, the groundhogs come out. 

When asked of any particularly memorable or funny wildlife-related adventures, Zoe giggles and asks, “How much time do you have?”

Kim (left) and Zoe Richardson and rescued ducklings (Photo courtesy of Nittany Valley Varmints)

“I like a skunk call,” Brian says. “They’re the most feared animal on the planet, and they’re the most docile, as long as you’re nice to them.”

Zoe says making little clicking noises to let the skunks know you’re there is advisable. But has Brian ever been sprayed?

“Oh yeah,” he says nonchalantly. “Every time I’ve been sprayed, I’ve known it was coming. Because when an adult skunk falls in a window well, half the time they’re too big to lower a small trap down and shove them in, so I just gotta reach in and grab it.”

“If he knows it’s gonna happen, he’ll take his hat off, his extra vest or shirt, shed a couple of layers,” says Kim. 

Zoe says she can usually tell when her dad has been sprayed because he’s preemptively removed the bracelets he always wears. 

Brian’s go-to skunk stench remedy is baking soda, peroxide, and Dawn dish soap. He says the old tomato soup trick is a myth and doesn’t work.  

“We go out of our way not to harm the animal, and sometimes you get sprayed,” says Brian. “But we can clean off easier than they can.” 

Kim warns readers using the skunk deodorizer recipe on pets to be careful around their eyes, as the mixture can get into animals’ tear ducts and hurt them. 

A recurring job the Richardsons take on is rescuing ducklings around State College, especially at Penn State. 

“They’re all over campus,” Brian says. “They fall in the sewer drains, and people hear them quacking.” 

One day, NVV spent hours pulling ducklings out of a sewer drain near the Ramada Inn on South Atherton Street. 

“They slid through the drain over to the other side, while mama was in the pond at the old Autoport Hotel,” Brian recalls. “We had to park my van in the road and just threw on the hazards, and luckily the cops showed up behind me and blocked traffic for like an hour while I’m hanging upside down with a police officer, and a deputy game warden finally showed up, pulling baby ducks out of the sewer drain onto the road.”

The family is not afraid of making a humorous spectacle of themselves to save critters, often much to the amusement of scores of bystanders.

“It’s hard to catch an animal that has the gift of flight sometimes,” says Kim. “You can imagine us all running around with nets chasing these things into a big container in the Nittany Lion Inn courtyard area. Ducks have been laying their eggs there for years and years. It was graduation weekend, and it was a fun adventure, with hundreds of people, and everyone’s got cellphones and cameras.”  

“Every day is different,” Brian says, and the family enjoys the challenge. Zoe, especially, becomes animated when she talks about the unpredictable and unusual circumstances in which the Richardsons find themselves doing this job.   

Brian and Kim recall that during Zoe’s second-grade parent-teacher conference, their daughter got a good report about her academic achievements, but the teacher told them, “Just so you know, we don’t want to cause any problems, but your daughter has quite the imagination. She tells these stories about catching skunks by hand, racoons and stuff.” 

“We’re like, no,” Brian says. “That’s true. That’s what we do.” 

Zoe’s teachers now know about the family business and that she isn’t telling tales out of school. 

Advice for homeowners

NVV’s motto is, “Don’t let YOUR home become THEIR home,” and the Richardsons do a lot to educate people on how to prevent an infestation of unwanted visitors, cute though they may often be. 

“Sometimes you get to a house, and it just looks like Swiss cheese,” Brian says. “The squirrels have been living there longer than the people have been living there.”

In these instances, “habitat modification” is the technical term Brian, who is also a licensed real estate home inspector, suggests. Modifying the rooflines of houses so squirrels don’t like them, for instance, is a practical step people can take to end home invasions. 

“If you hear something, don’t wait six months and say, ‘By the way, there’s an animal in my attic,’” says Kim. “The reason there are multiple animals, at this point, is because you didn’t take care of it when you first heard it.”

“You can catch mama squirrel in your little trap that you bought at Walmart, but did you leave 12 babies in your attic that are still stuck in there?” Brian says. 

When in doubt, call NVV, or another qualified professional nuisance wildlife controller. They know the habits of animals, how to handle them, and where to rehome them. 

“Just because you can buy a trap at Walmart doesn’t mean you should,” Brian explains. “If you set a trap for a groundhog and catch a skunk instead, people don’t know what to do.” 

The Richardsons have received dozens of calls from people out for a walk who report animals being left in traps for several days. 

“That’s just awful,” Brian says. “If you catch an animal by accident, call someone. Don’t just leave it in there. A dead skunk smells a lot worse than a live skunk, believe me.”

The game commission “doesn’t want the general public possessing wild animals, for obvious reasons,” Brian says. “A lot of people have chickens around here, and if they’re getting killed by something, people will set a trap. People may catch a fisher in there and go to a Penn State parking lot, or Tudek Park, and say, ‘This is a nice field; we’ll just let him go there.’ You have every right to protect your chickens, but you do not have the right to take that fisher you caught and turn it into somebody else’s problem.”

NVV is in close contact with an endangered species biologist who specializes in handling bats. It is illegal to kill bats or disturb them while they have babies, which will die without their adults. 

“That’s a tough sell to people,” Brian says, “when I’m like, ‘Yeah, there are 50 of them hanging right here, and I can’t do anything about it ’til August. Bats are kind of a nightmare. Give me a skunk call any day.”

“We do not recommend feeding outdoor animals,” says Kim. “A sociable bowl—you’re not always just going to feed your neighborhood cats. You’re going to get a lot of other animals and spread disease.”

“Take the stuff in at night because you don’t know what’s eating out of it,” Brian says. “Half the time, it’s not the cats eating it—it’s possums, skunks, raccoons, and that’s how they find their way into your house.”

Another thing: “People should get rid of their cat doors,” Brian says. 

NVV once responded to a call from a man who discovered a raccoon sleeping on his kitchen counter one morning. 

“It was in a box of pears,” Brian says. “All the pears are gone, and there’s a racoon sleeping in the food box the fruit came in. It trashed his kitchen.” 

And finally, the obvious advice, but it bears repeating: Don’t litter! NVV has responded to more than one event in which a wild animal was suffering because someone had been too lazy to put their trash in a proper receptacle. One job involved chasing 40 ducks around an apartment complex to try to catch one that had a beer tab stuck to its head. (Brian was able to dive and catch it, miraculously, with a net. It only took about six tries.) Another time, someone called the Richardsons to rescue a “pet” skunk with “one of those cones on it so it doesn’t scratch itself.” (It was a sleeve from a to-go coffee cup.) 

NVV wants you to be respectful of our furry, feathered, and scaly friends, and to call them when you encounter them in a place they don’t belong. 

“It’s not the animals’ fault where they’re at, because we keep building houses where they try to be,” Brian says.  

Teresa Mull is a freelance writer in Philipsburg.