Around all year in this climate, and the denning shows up most in cold snaps and while females are carrying young, in spring and again through summer.
An opossum turns up underneath something, essentially never above it: a deck, a shed floor, a porch, or a crawl space reached through a broken vent screen. The animal itself does very little. It hisses, it drools, it may lock up and play dead, and that is more or less the extent of it. What people actually ring about is the smell, the droppings and the flies. A good deal of the structural damage laid at its door was in fact a raccoon.
Copperheads west of Tallahassee make snake-aware pest work a real local need
Look for a smooth opening at ground level, roughly grapefruit sized, with the vegetation flattened in a line running away from it. Opossums take gaps that already exist and widen them rather than digging anything fresh, so the entrance usually began life as a rotted skirt board or the space left where a shed sits unevenly on its blocks.
An animal denning under a floor carries food in and leaves waste in the same confined space. On a still humid day that smell works its way into the house through the floor and around the doors, and it reads as garbage, or as something dead, rather than as something alive and living down there.
The droppings are obviously larger than anything a rat leaves, and they arrive with the evidence of an entirely undiscriminating appetite: cat food, fruit, snail shells, bits of trash dragged out of a cart. Flies collecting at one particular spot under a deck are usually the first thing anybody actually notices.
There is a great deal of ground level access in this market. Crawl space houses carry vent openings, access hatches and skirting, all of which age at the same rate, and one rotted screen round the back of the house is a door. Add in how many raised decks, detached sheds and screened porches sit on these lots, and there is nearly always somewhere dark and dry within twenty feet of a back step.
The soil here does a denning animal a favor. The surface sheds water fast, so the ground under a deck or a shed is not a puddle the morning after a summer storm, while the layer beneath stays cool and damp instead of baking hard. That is close to perfect for something that wants shelter for a few weeks and has no intention of building anything to get it.
Then the food, which is where most of these stories actually start. An opossum will eat more or less anything, so a cat bowl on the porch, a trash cart nobody latched, a compost heap or fruit dropping off a tree brings one back every night. They also work through a lot of ticks, snails and carrion, which is a real argument for leaving alone one that is simply crossing the yard rather than living under your floor.
Tallahassee's crawl spaces and pier-and-beam floors give opossums the same dry, enclosed cover they'd take under a porch, and the pros who cover this area see it just as often out toward Havana, Quincy, and along the Lake Talquin shoreline, where older homes and sheds sit up on open foundations. A raised floor or a loose skirting board reads as a den to a opossum, not a hazard, so sealing that gap matters as much as clearing what drew it there.
Out past the eastern edge of Tallahassee, homes near Chaires sit low against pasture and woodlot, and a crawlspace with a gap at the sill reads as prime denning ground once cooler nights set in. The same holds heading northeast toward Miccosukee, where older farmhouses along the canopy road back up to timber, and out toward Lloyd on US 90, where sheds and pier-and-beam floors near the historic district draw the same visits every fall.
Tallahassee sits on clay hills near the Ochlockonee and St. Marks rivers, not on the coast, and the ground here rarely freezes. Homes near Killearn Estates or Bradfordville face slab foundations or crawl spaces, never basements, which shapes where subterranean termites and moisture pests actually get in. Leon County's mild winters slow pest activity but almost never stop it outright.
A very large rat. Caught in a flashlight beam at the edge of a deck, the tail is what registers, and a bare tail on something moving low reads instantly as a rat. An adult opossum is very much bigger, carries a white face and a pointed pink nose, and freezes in the beam rather than bolting for cover. Once you have seen both, size settles it in about a second.
Because they move along readily, this job runs on timing rather than force. Establish which gap is in use and whether there are young, then either fit a one-way device or simply wait for the animal to head out at dusk, and close the opening properly once the space is known to be empty. Scattering a little flour across the entrance and reading the tracks next morning is a free and thoroughly reliable way to find out whether anything is still going in and out.
The lasting part is the barrier. Deck skirting and shed perimeters take hardware cloth, buried and turned outward in an L so nothing can shove under the edge, and crawl space vents and access doors take metal screening with hardware that genuinely latches. Then the space underneath gets cleaned and deodorized, because waste left where it lies is an open invitation to the next one. If the den was in a crawl space, this is also the moment to look at the insulation above it and at the ductwork, since a torn duct sitting in a fouled space pulls that air straight into the house.
Betton Hills sits on the same clay soil as most of Tallahassee, and that soil holds moisture long after a storm passes. Eastern subterranean termites work through that dampness quietly, often for years, before anyone in Midtown or Levy Park notices a mud tube along a slab edge or a porch post.
| Full Protection | What's Covered |
|---|---|
| Slab and Crawl Space Homes Only | Licensed Local Pros |
| Termite and roach service near Lake Ella | Slab vs. Crawl Space |
| Copperhead Country West of Tallahassee Calls for Care | Bed Bug Help Near FSU Housing |
Set beside a raccoon this is a mess rather than a demolition, and knowing the difference saves people real money. What you get is fouled ground, contaminated crawl space insulation, a vapor barrier dragged out of place, duct insulation chewed or pulled about, and a smell that outlasts the animal by weeks. What you do not get from an opossum is a torn soffit, a lifted ridge vent or a hole punched through a roof deck. If any of that is present on the same house, something stronger made it, and sealing up behind the opossum leaves the genuine entry point standing wide open.
Taking away the reason it came is genuine work and all of it is yours to do. Feed the pets indoors, latch the trash cart, pick the fallen fruit up, clear the brush pile, and close the gap in the deck skirt with hardware cloth instead of lattice. Leaving one exit open and reading the tracks is well within reach for most people too. Where it goes sideways is grabbing at the animal or trying to trap it. It will hiss and bare its teeth, which frightens people into doing something sudden, and a stressed animal in a cage in the wrong hands is exactly how somebody, or a dog, ends up bitten.
Termite swarm on Thomasville Road or roaches near Lake Ella, the same call works. Reach the licensed pros we connect you with at (850) 388-6192.You pay nothing for the look, and the scope is agreed on paper before a tool comes out. The full bands, and what moves them, are set out on the pricing guide, and the matching service is Wildlife Removal.
Dens low, digs shallow, and sprays accurately. A skunk is after two things, and the odds are your property is handing over both: somewhere dry under a porch, a deck or a shed to den in, and a lawn carrying enough insect life in the top two inches to be worth digging through.
Works in daylight. Chews its own way in. A gray squirrel does not find a way into a Leon County attic.
Protected, with a closed season. Nobody traps bats and nobody poisons them.
Almost certainly not. That display is the entire defense, along with the drooling and, sometimes, collapsing into a stiff apparently dead state that can go on for a surprisingly long time. Step back and it will go. Corner it or reach for it and you have created the risk yourself, so give it an obvious way out instead.
Usually not. Opossums drift between dens rather than settling anywhere for years, so if the food goes and the gap gets closed behind it once it leaves, the whole thing ends without a trap ever coming out of the van. Trapping is for the animal that will not move, or for a den with young in it.
Because the waste, the bedding and what is left of the food are all still down there, and in a damp enclosed space that carries on producing odor for weeks. That smell is also the advertisement that tells the next animal this den worked out nicely. Cleaning and deodorizing are part of the job rather than something added onto the bill.
They go out of their way to avoid a confrontation, but a dog that corners one can be bitten or scratched, and both animals can come away hurt. They also carry fleas and ticks into whatever yard they den in. The practical answer is a leash for the last walk of the night and the den space closed off properly.
Termite swarms follow the same warm, wet spring stretch that soaks Lake Jackson and Lake Iamonia every year, which is why so many Tallahassee inspection calls cluster then.
Call (850) 388-6192