What's living under your porch
A few months ago, producer Marina Henke saw two skunks sprint under her porch. Since then, she can’t stop wondering what’s really going on beneath her feet.
And as it turns out, she’s not the only one. Every day across the country, homeowners are waging wars with the animals who stake out our porches, decks and crawl spaces. Have we as humans inadvertently designed luxury apartments for “unwelcome” wildlife? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
In a new edition of our (long-retired!) 10x10 series we’re going under the porch. So, grab your headlamps, put on a different pair of pants and watch out for skunks.
Featuring Christopher Schell, Kieran Lindsey, Josh Sparks and Maynard Stanley.
SUPPORT
The skunk that started it all. Credit: Marina Henke.
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LINKS
Want more 10x10s? We’ve got ‘em! Listen here for traffic circles, gutters, sand beaches, kettle bogs and vernal pools.
You can read more about the “biological deserts fallacy” here.
The Schell Lab at UC Berkeley is up to all kinds of urban ecology research.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Kate Dario
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, El Flaco Collective and Spring Gang
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
We want to hear from you! Hate what’s under your porch? Love what’s under your porch? You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Marina Henke: Hey Nate.
Nate Hegyi: Hey! Marina!
Marina Henke: So, you know I just moved to Maine this summer, right?
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Marina Henke: Well, I’m renting this great apartment. And hands down the best thing about it is it has a porch.
Nate Hegyi: Oooh. Is it like an open porch or is it like a sun porch? Are there windows? Or can you just like – are you just getting the fresh sea breeze coming in?
Marina Henke: Oh I’m getting the fresh sea breeze absolutely.
Nate Hegyi: Nice. Nice.
Marina Henke: There are moments where like I look at it and the wood is starting to warp a little bit. And, you know, I walk out and I say ‘Is this going hold up?”
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, but I mean this is the East Coast, this is the East Coast. Everything is old and warped.
Marina Henke: (Laughs). But it’s so great. And then, one night this fall, I’m watching the sun set. I peer over the railing… just in time to see… SKUNKS.
[MUX in, Orejitas – Blue Dot]
Nate Hegyi: Ohhhh! Oh no! What did you do?
Marina Henke: So there’s two of them. And I just honestly stood there, frozen. And then, before I can even blink… they SPRINT under my porch.
Nate Hegyi: This is like Tremors! The creatures are right underneath your feet now. Don’t move Marina, don’t move!
Marina Henke: (Laughs). Well and this gets to the next thing which is that I realized like I was feeling two things at once: I was INCREDIBLY excited – I think an embarrassing amount if that’s not coming off a little bit.
Nate Hegyi: No, you work for a nature show. I mean, fair.
Marina Henke: Yeah, wildlife in my backyard? Sign me up. But then, also I think I was like a little spoked. You know? The area beneath my feet it just suddenly felt very very alive. Like I wasn’t even just thinking about the skunks anymore. You know, like I started to think like, what ELSE is under there?
Nate Hegyi: Mmm.
Marina Henke: Oooh. What is that!?... I am army crawling out from under the porch.
Marina Henke: And that is why it’s time to bring back a semi-retired-ish series to the show.
Nate Hegyi: Are you talking about the 10x10s?
Marina Henke: Oh, I sure am.
Nate Hegyi: I have never done one! I’ve been at this job for almost 3 years, I have not done a 10x10. I am very excited about this.
Marina Henke: And for our listeners who don’t know what a 10x10 is – this is a series where we take an area that maybe you don’t think about in your life. You know we’ve done an episode on traffic circles, on gutters – and we just zoom in.
Nate Hegyi: So yeah – like in this like little square patch of land.
Marina Henke: I mean, square-ish, you know we take the 10x10 concept with like a little grain of salt. But yeah– we basically just say “what the heck is going on there?
Josh Sparks: I can go into any yard in Portland and set a trap and I will catch skunks.
Nate Hegyi: Today on Outside/ In, grab your headlamps, put on a different pair of pants – because Marina is going UNDER the porch. Literally.
Marina Henke: I have never been that close to a skunk.
Nate Hegyi: Stick around.
AD BREAK
Starting off, I’d never actually been under my porch. So a few days after the skunk sighting, I changed into an old shirt, hoped my neighbors weren’t looking, and went outside.
(Street noise fades in)... Okay.
Marina Henke: Alright…so I’m under the porch… I’m seeing um two old grills, um… and some broken flower pots… I’m realizing there’s tons of broken glass down here and I’m not wearing pants… okay!!
Honesty, there wasn’t much there. I needed to increase my sample size.
[MUX in, Building the Sled – Blue Dot]
You know a fantastic way to make new friends? You text everyone you know and you say, “Hey, can I come crawl under your porch?”
Marina Henke: Now see this one I can kind of stand… ope!... up under.
Up first, it was a pretty clean one. Spacious even.
Marina Henke: No signs of life,
Still Nothing. Onwards I crawled.
Marina Henke: My belly is fully on the ground… we’ve got pine needles, we’ve got leaves… there’s a seashell…
One important note – I’m taking a bit of liberty with the term “porch.” I looked under decks, balconies, the occasional back stairwell… and here’s my initial report. The area under your porch is where all that stuff that you sort of forgot about… ends up. I felt like I was crawling between my couch cushions.
Marina Henke: There’s a little grocery list here, ‘egg, pork, fried rice, no veggies.’… huh… I’m going to take that… well. No. I’m going to leave that there. Leave no trace (mumbles off).
[MUX swell and fade]
Except for one exciting moment –
Marina Henke: Oooh, is that some SCAT?!
All of these porches pretty much felt like ecological dead zones.
But that’s just not the case.
Kieran Lindsey: There's worms, there's grubs, there's ants, there's bacteria.
This is Dr. Kieran Lindsey, a wildlife biologist and program director at Virginia Tech University.
Kieran Lindsey: The soil underneath whatever foundation that is… that's a complete biome all of its own.
All those dead leaves I rustled through are a perfect place for moths and beetles and butterflies to lay eggs. Kieran describes the area under our porch as a pocket habitat.
Kieran Lindsey: Sometimes they are spaces that we intentionally create, and sometimes they’re these sort of accidental spaces.
Marina Henke: I think a question I have is have we accidentally, if we think about the area under our porches, built like the perfect apartment for a lot of animals, the perfect spot for them to be?
Kieran Lindsey: Certainly. Yeah. Do we do it on purpose? No, but a lot of things that we do are not intentional, right?
[MUX IN, Papa Punk – Spring Gang]
I may not have seen any yet… but the list of animals that you may find under your porch is long.
Kieran Lindsey: Raccoons. Opossums. A skunk.
…Mice, skunks...
Kieran Lindsey: Groundhogs. Chipmunks.
Foxes, skunks. So many skunks.
[MUX beat]
And honestly this long list? It makes sense. Here’s a place that’s protected, dry, free of humans, and not too far from trash cans or compost piles…
Kieran Lindsey: It's like DoorDash! But you don't need a credit card.
This is sounding great, right?
But here’s where I have to confess something. Imagining all of these animals coming in and out of our porches – just kind of bummed me out. I guess, there’s this instinct I have – when I see animals in a city, I feel a little bad for them.
Now, there’s some good reason for that. This branch of wildlife – which are often called nuisance animals – they don’t always have the best reputation. And it shows – they’ve been lured by traps, blocked from bird feeders, and sometimes just down right hunted.
Which might make you and me guess that the only reason they’re ending up under our porches is because they’ve been kicked out of the habitats they really want to live in – right? Wwrrronnng.
Chris Schell: Many of the animals that are in cities, a good chunk of them are in cities for a reason. They want to be in cities. And oftentimes, organisms that are born in cities if they disperse they try to find something very similar.
This is Dr. Christopher Schell – he runs an urban ecology lab at UC Berkeley.
And Chris’ lab couldn’t have existed fifty years ago… because the term urban ecology didn’t really exist then. Back then if an ecologist heard you wanted to study cities the message was pretty simple…
Chris Schell: That if you study ecology in the city, you're wasting your career.
[MUX IN, Coulis Coulis - Blue Dot]
That’s because … for a long time, ecologists thought there wasn’t that much to study.
One of Chris’ colleagues calls this “the biological deserts fallacy.” It’s the idea that cities are wildlife wastelands.
Chris Schell: And most of the animals that live in those urban environments are just rats, pigeons and cockroaches.
Urban ecologists are proving this idea wrong every day. There are coyotes in the Pacific Northwest. Javelina in Arizona. Otters in Singapore. These are animals that aren’t just showing up a lot in cities, they’re thriving in them.
Chris Schell: We create urban environments in places that are resource rich. So why then would we somehow expect that we also don't have biodiverse species in our cities?
Righting the wrong of this “biological desert fallacy” is an uphill battle. It’s left a cultural imprint on us – and me feeling bad for the possum under a porch is a perfect example. Because feeling bad for animals living in a city isn’t too different from thinking they don’t belong there.
[MUX beat and fade out]
While we humans have been getting all torn up about these feelings – animals have adapted in pretty miraculous ways to our built environment. Skunks, as it turns out, are nomadic. They don’t LIVE-live under porches, but they DO use them as a temporary landing pad … it’s like a skunk’s version of an airport terminal.
And Chris says - there’s nothing wrong with that.
Chris Schell: Seeing animals in cities is not a bad thing. If anything, seeing animals in cities is a sign that your city is still working to be ecologically healthy, resilient and sustainable.
This was all feeling like pretty good news. Our porches make great refuge for wildlife, which makes for more diverse urban ecosystems.
But except for that first skunk sighting, I still hadn’t actually seen anything under the porch. It was starting to feel just a little anticlimactic. And then…
[CAMPING AMBIENT NOISE FADES IN]
Marina Henke: Okay I am approaching this porch.
This October I went camping. I was sleeping on a tent platform – basically a porch, without a house.
Marina Henke: Okay, I’m going to go deeper… there’s about 6 inches above me… I have to say it is about to rain I think and it is just perfectly dry down here. Alright I’m turning around – acgh, I am army crawling out from under the porch!
Still though – no animals, but anybody with a Ring camera could tell me right now what my problem was. If you want to see wildlife, you just wait until after dark.
[MUX in, Leatherbound Clouider – Blue Dot]
That night, sitting on this platform, I heard what sounded exactly like tiny wet footsteps in the bushes. I switched my headlamp on, and five feet from me was a SKUNK. And five feet from that skunk… was a possum. Both making a beeline for MY porch.
Marina Henke: (Whispers) I have never been that close to a skunk.
And that was actually more than I was hoping for.
Marina Henke: (Whispers) I'm like, trying to be this you know good, even keeled, forward thinking, ecologically oriented human being. But… bleackk! Go away skunks! Get out of here!...
Coming up… what to do with that “bleackkk” feeling? How do we deal with the fact that, even if we like animals, we might not want them living under our porches?
That’s after a break.
[MUX, fades]
AD BREAK
Maynard Stanley: Sometimes you find yourself on your back… inching along with your shoulders and pushing in with your heels. And then you find some plumbing is leaking. That's why it's muddy under there.
Maynard Stanley has been under a lot of porches.
Maynard Stanley: Been doing this kind of work for over 30 years. Never been sprayed by a skunk.
That work is Critter Catcher – a pest control service Maynard runs out of Owls Head, Maine, right in the heart of what we call the “Midcoast.” A few weeks ago, I drove up there to talk to him.
Marina Henke: Nice to meet you.
Maynard Stanley: Here’s the chickens!
Marina Henke: An important introduction!... (FADES)
Maynard’s seen it all.
Maynard Stanley: Fox, raccoons, porcupines, woodchucks, snakes, weasels. And of course skunks. Skunks are probably the number one animal that goes under decks and porches.
Yanking those animals out of porches is an artform – one of the most low and high tech things I’ve seen in a while. We head outside to take a look.
Marina Henke: Here are all these chickens again!
Maynard Stanley: Hi girls! How’s my girls? (Chickens cluck).
Marina Henke: Oh wow, look at those!
Maynard has these really fancy trail cams. They’ll take a picture every couple seconds. He screws them onto people’s houses…
Maynard Stanley: Aim it. And then after a couple days, I'll take the card out of it and I'll find out what's going under the porch.
Combined with a set of tiny handheld infrared sensors — sometimes he’s showing up to jobs with hundreds of dollars of gear in his truck.
The traps though are a different kind of beast. There were big wire ones – these looked a lot like miniature dog crates, but with all these interior compartments and these clanky metal doors.
Maynard Stanley: This will catch squirrels or rats… put bait in the center… latch it… CLANK.
[MUX in, Dozerasa Youngman – Blue Dot]
Maynard will be the first to say: porches? They stir up big feelings. And that’s ‘cause – things get weird under there.
He once watched a whole backyard drop 5 inches when a maze of rat tunnels collapsed from a single footstep…
Maynard Stanley: And it just gave you this creepy feeling, like if I'd walked out there, I might have just fallen down into a chasm of rats and be eaten alive.
There was the time the baby racoons found their way under a client’s deck, made their way right above the bedroom and spent nights leaping off rafters for fun. The couple thought they were being robbed.
And, the smell of a dead raccoon left to freeze and then unfreeze under a house?
Maynard Stanley: It's really disgusting. Gut wrenching.
[MUX swells and fades]
And so, people generally want things OUT from under their porch.
Now, everyone I talked to for this story - EVEN THE ECOLOGISTS - said it’s perfectly normal for humans to protect their own habitats.
Sometimes, that means creating whole new lines of defense. If a client really wants to keep animals out, Maynard will wrap a wall of metal wiring around the bottom of a porch. Then, he’ll run a couple inches underground – flat like a carpet. If you’re a curious skunk and you hit that...
Maynard Stanley: They give up… they don't know that if they dig all the way back and then go down, and then they could go under. They just don't do that.
A lot of the time though homeowners defend their porches by evicting unwanted guests.
Or trying to anyway. All over the world, humans are fighting a battle we cannot win.
Josh Sparks: Someone in Westbrook last year they had a skunk. They knew it was the same one. It had a specific pattern.
This is Josh Sparks, another animal control agent in Maine. When this family called him up they told him they needed this skunk gone. It had sprayed their dog a couple times. Enough was enough.
Josh Sparks: I said well, I’ll set some traps, but you know there’s probably more than one, you’ll probably still have skunks coming around. “No, no, it’s just the one.”
Josh sets his traps. And in the morning, he has not one, but 3 skunks. That couple calls him, says…
Josh Sparks: … we saw the one that we always see after you caught these three. So that's what I tried to explain.
[MUX IN, Chicken Steak – Blue Dot]
So you can try to keep animals out… or you can try and “remove” them.
Urban ecologists often try to offer a middle ground.
Chris Schell: Living in the same place doesn't mean that you have to have the same house. It means that you cohabitate in this larger space and you respect each other's space.
But, spaces are squishy things. And, under the porch is a super squishy one. Is it outside? Or in? Are skunks invading? Or cohabitating?
Marina Henke: If maybe I shouldn't be that worried about a skunk getting under my porch. What are the animals that I do need to worry about? What do I not want to see under my porch?
Maynard Stanley: I mean, none of them really is going to hurt you.
Maynard and Josh – two guys who literally make their living from getting animals out of where we’ve decided they shouldn’t be – they’re an unlikely ally to urban ecologists.
Josh says for the vast majority of calls he gets about animals spotted under the porch – he doesn’t actually remove anything.
Josh Spark: I try to bring them to my way of seeing it. And usually I can, usually I can just educate them and they can understand that what they’re seeing is not a problem.
[MUX fades]
Now these guys aren’t making a case for some wildlife free for all – and I should say there are PLENTY of animal control agents that will ‘exterminate’ your problem without giving a second thought.
But Maynard and Josh are realistic about what they can and cannot control. And a lot of times they’re more in control of their clients’ feelings than the nightly movements of a neighborhood skunk.
Maynard: I think probably the one of the most important things is with people – they don't want to feel belittled, because they're having an animal issue. You know, you got to treat people with respect and understand everybody's different and people's reactions to animals are different.
I couldn’t help but wonder – is this a problem we could engineer our way out of?
Marina Henke: I want you to imagine that you were put on a team of city planners and engineers, and you're designing a new city. Someone says, I want to make these homes… not one porch, not one deck. I want these homes to be 100% sealed from, you know, from wildlife. What would your recommendation be to that? What would you say to that?
Kieran Lindsey: I might be tempted to start calling them Don Quixote.
[MUX IN, Haena – Blue Dot]
Don Quixote, the deluded knight.
Kieran Lindsey: I understand what the intention would be of that, but I think there would be some fairly negative unintended consequences of that..
Kieran’s hang up here is... a world with no porches might make us pretty sad. Biologist and environmental icon E.O. Wilson popularized the term “biophilia” in the 1980s. It’s the idea that humans naturally want to connect with living things – it’s basically in our evolutionary wiring.
Kieran Lindsey: Human beings, as a species, we like a certain kind of environment around us.
There’s a reason corporate offices keep trees in their lobbies. Why your dentist has photos of mountains on the walls. And, it’s also why we hang things like bird feeders. Which drop seeds on the ground. Which then brings rats or mice or skunks, Which we… hate. See the problem?
[MUX beat and fade]
Essentially we’re picky biophillics. And the degree to which we include our porch’s biomes as part of our biophilia – it’s kind of up to each porch owner. Like me.
Now, Maynard did offer to help get rid of my skunks – it involved a very specific brand of buttered popcorn and a trip to a farm supply store to buy a trap.
But, the skunks are staying put.
[Forgot His Jam, MUX IN – Blue Dot]
Because spending the past few weeks on the lookout for something UNDER my porch, also meant I just spent a lot of time out ON my porch.
[BACKYARD AMBIENT NOISE FADES IN]
Marina Henke: Ope! Okay I hear some rustling!
And, I’ve got the skunks to thank for that.
[MUX & PORCH AMBIENT NOISE FADES OUT]
CREDITS
[CREDITS MUX, Young Buck – Blue Dot]
Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke.
It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby.
I’m your host, Nate Hegyi. Our team also includes Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Kate Dario.
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio – she’s got some great possums that hang out under her porch.
Speaking of possums … we want to hear from you! Hate what’s under your porch? Love what’s under your porch? You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Spring Gang, and El Flaco Collective. Outside/In is a production of NHPR.