Nuisance Wildlife Control Operators in Illinois

By Anderson Wiese, Founder

Last year I blogged about Nuisance Animal Removal Permits for citizens of Illinois. For those who aren’t prepared to handle nuisance animals themselves, Nuisance Wildlife Control Operators (NWCOs) provide a valuable service to trap that pesky raccoon or chase the bats out of your belfry.

In late 2024 we released a new service on WILD to manage permitting and reporting for NWCOs. Each year, reports must be gathered from over 700 permitted operators, then new permits issued for the upcoming year. Previously this task consumed most of a full-time employee’s work for around five months. The new automated system will reduce that to a fraction of the time and make life easier for the operators too.

This is the second major service for Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) built on WILD. We designed WILD to be a multi-purpose platform for services to Illinois citizens and IDNR employees, responsive to citizens, saving staff resources, and improving data consistency and reporting. NARP was first, then NWCO, and now we are planning this year’s expansions.

The NWCO system was excitingly complex. There are employers, employees, permits, reports, SMS and email messaging, PDF generation, spreadsheet exports, email reminders with HTML content and attachments, and just a bunch of cool challenging technical details. We had a blast.

The NWCO process begins near the end of the calendar year when a Reminder is sent out to all permit holders. It contains instructions and a link to start their online annual report.

Staff can compose the message in plain text or HTML, schedule when it will be sent, choose who should receive the message, and add attachments. Near the deadline, reminders may be sent to those permit holders who still haven’t reported.

Many operators have been using the previous paper-based system for years, so we tried to make the new system as familiar as possible. The permit on the system looks like the paper document they received in the past.  

Permit holders will usually begin their annual report from the link in the email reminder. In the first step of the report, they update their WILD profile, including contact information, company name, and the counties they serve as NWCOs. This is also where an employer can update the employees of the company.

The employer/employee relationship is a challenging aspect of the application. Each employee must be a NWCO permit holder, but an employer may or may not be a permit holder themselves. An employer reports on behalf of their own and all their employees’ NWCO activities for the year.

To add a new employee, the employer must enter the phone number of a current NWCO permit holder who is not already an employee of another company. A text message and email is sent to the prospective employee. If they accept, the employee will be added to the company. Employees may also choose to leave an employer, in which case they become independent NWCOs, responsible for their own reports.

In the main body of the report, the permit holder notes the activity for any of 18 possible species that may be euthanized, relocated, released, or given to rehabilitators. Relocation sites are recorded along with how many animals of each species are relocated there. A final report cannot be submitted until all relocated animals are accounted for in the relocation sites.

Each year the IDNR staff include statistics for all NWCO activity for an annual report to US Fish and Wildlife Service. The NWCO system allows for reports to be listed by criteria, and exported to an Excel spreadsheet which contains all of the report data.

In this first year of operation, the NWCO system has already saved IDNR staff many days of work, and feedback from the operators has been overwhelmingly positive.

We are grateful to our clients and colleagues at IDNR for the opportunity to create such enduring and impactful work.