The Critter Hunter

He stalks skunks, raccoons, foxes, snakes, and more—any wild varmint that's invaded city or suburb. Got bats in the Attic? Rick Wilberschied is on the case

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The first thing you need to know about Rick Wilberschied is that he punched a bear in the face. The second is that the moment was not all that remarkable, at least not to him.

Of course, he has a rich portfolio of bizarre critter tales from which to draw. Such as the Maggot-Dripping Raccoon, a corpse he pulled from the chimney of a bridal preparation suite. ("Maggots everywhere," Wilberschied recalls. "Fat ones. Thin ones. Raining down all over me, in my hair, down my shirt. One of the guys standing next to me was gagging. All these girls hanging out with maggots all over the place—good times!") Or Snakes on a Plane, in which Wilberschied—channeling Samuel L. Jackson—found himself chasing a group of zoo-bound rattlers that had slithered out of their crates and into the cargo hold of a parked jetliner. (The passengers, fortunately, had departed.) Or the Flying Raccoon. In that instance, Wilberschied received a 3 a.m. call to rescue a family from a raccoon that had broken through the ceiling. The creature, shrieking and clawing, had dropped into a crib occupied by a blissfully slumbering baby.

"The kid was looking at the 'coon, and the 'coon was looking at the kid," Wilberschied says. "The parents grabbed the child, ran out the door, and locked it." The baby was fine, he says. The father was "screaming like an eight-year-old girl who's torn her Easter dress."

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It's a jungle out there. Or, rather, in here. In the city. In the suburbs. In schools, churches, cafés, nightclubs. Bats, rats, bees, fleas, raccoons, opossums. Snakes on a plane. Foxes in the henhouse. Bambi in the backyard. Gophers on the greens. Urban coyotes. Suburban cougars. Ducks, mice, moles, voles, woodchucks, chipmunks, bunnies, hedgehogs, and squirrels. To name a few.

They are wild and they are hungry and they want in. And their numbers are growing. In 2006 alone, Illinois nuisance wildlife operators like Wilberschied caught 16,000 raccoons, 15,000 squirrels, 5,000 striped skunks, 6,000 opossums, 1,200 muskrats, 300 coyotes, and too many bats and birds to count. Since 1992, the number of reported wildlife problems in Illinois has almost tripled—from 36,000 a year to more than 92,000.

Experts say the lack of natural predators, shrinking habitats due to hyperdevelopment, and, above all, the presence of a running blue-plate special account for the perfect animal storm. "First of all, they have all the food they could ever want," says Bob Bluett, a wildlife biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. "You can go into the Dumpsters behind TGI Friday's. You can go into somebody's garbage cans, or dog dish. You can pick up June bugs underneath streetlamps.

"Then, they have all these comfy places to live—attics, basements, stoops." Finally, you have residents who not only tolerate the critters, but feed them, nurture them, treat them like pets. The result? Fifty-eight percent of respondents to a 2001 survey of Illinois homeowners reported having repeated problems with wildlife—from digging to burrowing to scattering garbage to moving in.

The problem is not confined to the United States. In Kathmandu, Nepal, a group of monkeys invaded the Indian Embassy, attacking embassy officials, defecating in offices, and destroying equipment. In India's Parliament complex, monkeys ransacked files, screeched at visitors, and banged on office windows. In parts of Canada there have been so many "nuisance bear" incidents that the sight of a black bear picking through the garbage barely raises an alarm. Closer to home, the Chicago area has experienced numerous problems with coyotes, and more dramatically, the case last April of a cougar running loose on the North Side. The animal was eventually shot and killed by police.

Nationwide, wildlife mischief has been blamed for more than $22 billion a year in damage to homes and property. Earlier this year, a single skunk drove a Highland Park family from their five-bedroom home. The family first noticed the smell in April 2007 after returning from vacation. At first, they dismissed it, but the stench grew worse by the day. Soon, one of the children was being called Skunk Boy at school, according to the Chicago Tribune. Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Chicago-based Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation described the smell to the paper as "putrid, sewer-like, musty, swampy, musky, uriniferous, and stale." The odor, he said, "was like being slapped in the face."

Still, some people argue that humans, not animals, are the invaders. "If greedy developers would stop building strip malls and condos, maybe the wildlife wouldn't have to come in contact with humans," wrote one poster to an online forum on the rise in nuisance wildlife problems in Florida. Even the owners of the Highland Park home that suffered so much damage had a soft spot for the skunk run amuck. When asked about the critter by the Tribune, one of the owners allowed that it "was actually very cute."

Most people, however, are far less sanguine, especially when the animals sneak into homes, gorge on prize petunias, and squat in attics.

When that happens, they call Wilberschied.

His fees vary, depending on how far away the job is, what kind of critter he's up against, and whether he's forced to hand-capture the animal or simply set a trap. Babies cost extra, as do cases involving hand-to-paw combat, depending on how bad and bloody the fight.

Watching Wilberschied work is like watching a master deep-woods tracker. He sees things the rest of us don't. On one call, a puzzled homeowner with a squirrel problem said he couldn't imagine how the critter had slipped into his house. Wilberschied walked right up to a spot under an eave and pointed at a small sliver of a crack, surrounded by tiny, almost imperceptible scratch marks. The homeowner, astonished, shook his head. "I had no idea they could get in through a space that small." At another site, I was busy looking at the roof of a house when Wilberschied cast a glance at the lawn. He indicated several nearly invisible bulges in the turf. "This guy's got serious mole problems," he said.

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Slideshow: Esther Kang
Photograph: Ryan Robinson

This article appears in the September 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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