Beaver
Physical Description: About 2 to 3 feet long, with small eyes, water-repellent brown fur, and a broad, flat tail. Beavers thrive in wooded areas near streams, rivers, ponds, and marshes.
Effects on Buildings & Property: Beavers can damage crops, timber stocks, roads, ditches, gardens, shorelines, and pastures via gnawing, eating, digging, and flooding. Flooding caused by beavers can additionally result in sinkholes, potholes, broken roads and sidewalks, unsafe barrier walls, and ruined landscaping.
Livestock & Pet Danger: They occasionally attack humans and domestic pets, particularly when infected with rabies, in defense of their territory, or when they feel threatened.
Health & Safety Concerns: Though rare, beavers can carry rabies. More often, they can contaminate water with a pathogenic intestinal parasite that humans are susceptible to.
Foxes
Physical Description & Habitat: Averaging 3 feet long, foxes have pointy ears, elongated snouts, and long, bushy tails. Depending on the species, their fur is reddish-brown with either white or black tipped tails. Foxes typically live in meadows, parks, and woodlands, but are comfortable getting closer to human establishments in search of food and shelter.
Effects on Buildings & Property: Foxes can dig up vegetation in search for food and burrow on property where there are high food sources. If they dig holes and burrow under buildings they can cause foundation issues. Additionally, a fox on your property could be driving rodents into your home as they search for a way to escape from this predator.
Livestock & Pet Danger: Small mammals are a large part of foxes diet, and small pets may easily be included in a fox’s search for food. Some foxes may carry canine distemper or tularemia and pose a threat to dogs.
Health & Safety Concerns: Foxes can carry the organisms that are responsible for several contagious diseases, such as mange, distemper, and rabies. Foxes with sarcoptic mange lose their hair and weight and their skin becomes cracked and encrusted with heavy scabs. Infected foxes usually die from the affliction within 2 to 4 months. Humans can contract the microscopic mite responsible for mange from infested coyotes, foxes, and dogs, but the disease is less intense, consisting of a mild form of dermatitis.
Groundhogs (Woodchucks)
Physical Description: About 1 to 2 feet long, with stocky bodies, flat heads, rounded noses, short legs, diminutive ears, and bushy tails. Their fur color ranges from yellow-gray to a variety of shades of brown. Groundhogs can be found in crop fields, meadows, pastures, and near wooded areas.
Effects on Buildings & Property: Groundhogs frequently enter yards, gardens, crops, and landscape vegetation areas in search for new sources of food, and can cause devastating vegetation loss. Their burrow systems can leave holes and unstable earth that can be a danger to farm animals and equipment. Extensive burrowing can undermine foundations.
Livestock & Pet Danger: Very often, the dens of groundhogs provide homes for other animals, including skunks, red foxes, and cottontail rabbits. Foxes and skunks feed upon field mice, grasshoppers, beetles, and other creatures that destroy farm crops.
Health & Safety Concerns: Groundhogs can carry diseases, such as tularemia and rabies, and serve as hosts to botflies, mites, ticks, fleas, and lice.
Muskrat
Physical Description & Habitat: Large rodents with have small eyes, rounded ears, and stocky bodies covered in brown fur. They typically live close to freshwater in places like marshes, ponds, lakes, and streams.
Effects on Buildings & Property: Muskrats build sizable lodges of cattails, sedges, and other vegetation. They also dig burrows near the water’s edge for shelter, and their burrowing sometimes weakens earthen dams and dikes.
Livestock & Pet Danger: Muskrats typically do not harm people but may bite or scratch in defense if cornered. If a muskrat population grows too large, they may eat up all the aquatic vegetation and strip wetlands of all available food sources.
Health & Safety Concerns: Muskrat feces can contaminate water, causing flu-like symptoms.
Raccoons
Physical Description: Most easily recognized by their busy, striped tails and mask-like band of black fur under their eyes, raccoons have stout bodies, short legs, and gray fur with black and white markings. They typically like to live in woodland areas near water sources, but they have increasingly adapted to city live by learning to scavenge from garbage cans and gardens. In more urban settings, raccoons can live in house attics, inside walls, under porches or decks, and in crawlspaces.
Effects on Buildings & Property: In search for food and shelter, raccoons can easily damage buildings by tearing shingles and boards to get access to a building, creating holes and pathways into a home. They can cause further damages to the interior and exterior of a building as they build denning sites. In the garden, raccoons will easily strip plants and any food they have access to.
Livestock & Pet Danger: Raccoons are omnivores and with their nimble hands can open chicken coops, destroying the birds, nests, and eggs inside. Raccoons often have fleas and ticks that can be transferred to pets and livestock.
Health & Safety Concerns: The presence of raccoons in close proximity to humans may be undesirable, as raccoon droppings (like most wild animals) contain parasites and other disease vectors. Raccoon roundworm is of particular concern to public health. It can be contracted in humans by accidental ingestion or inhalation of the eggs, which are present in the feces of infected raccoons. While usually harmless to the host, it causes progressive neurological damage in humans, and is eventually fatal if untreated. It is found in about 60% of adult raccoons.
Reference: https://www.crittercontrol.com/