Get matched with top pest control specialists in Flanagan, IL

Keeping birds away from a porch can involve a combination of strategies. Start with cleaning your porch. Remove food, debris, and plants that may be attracting feathered friends. Afterward, install physical deterrents like netting or spikes. Next, top off your porch with a decoy or two—and owl or hawk works. When wondering how to keep birds off the porch, it is always best to use humane efforts that won't harm winged creatures or the environment.

Bed bugs bite your body to feed on blood. When they bite, they inject an anticoagulant, which is why you may see blood stains on your sheets if you have an infestation. The bed bugs tend to bite in clusters, so the bite marks will look like itchy, red spots in zigzagging lines of three to five bites per cluster on your skin.

The bites are itchy, but for most people, they do not cause serious or long-term health complications. Itching the wound excessively could lead to an infection, and some people are allergic to bed bugs.

Skunks spray as a defense mechanism to ward off predators. The active ingredient in their sulfurous, oily musk is n-butyl mercaptan, which evaporates into a powerful and smelly gas. Once the spray hits the skunk’s target, the stench can linger for days, and water and common cleaning kits aren’t enough to wash it away.

If you happen upon a skunk in your yard, try to back away slowly to reduce the chance of them aiming at you. Encouragingly, they don’t use their weapon casually, as it can take up to 10 days for their life-saving weaponry to refill. Paw stamping, hissing, lifting their tail, and arching their back are early signs they feel trapped or under threat and that it’s time to make a careful retreat.

You should not squish a roach because it can spread disease, attract more roaches, and release allergens. Roaches feed on the bodies of dead roaches, making more of them come. Squashing an individual roach only kills that one, whereas boric acid powder or baking soda can kill an entire population because it travels back to the nest before dying.