- (301) 829-0060
- Mt. Airy, MD
- info@pestshieldinc.com
Pest Shield, Inc. has served Frederick County homeowners since 2011, operating under Maryland Department of Agriculture license MDA #30263 with a team that brings over 75 years of combined pest management experience — including owner Troy Yowell’s background managing disease-carrying pest threats on U.S. military bases overseas. Jeffrey Allwine, Pest Shield’s on-staff entomologist, provides species-level identification when the situation calls for it. For bat removal calls in Emmitsburg, that combination of field experience and diagnostic depth means you get an honest assessment of what you’re actually dealing with — not a upsell to services you don’t need.
How it works
Four steps. No surprises. Same answer whether it's your first call or your tenth.
You reach Troy or someone on his team directly. No call center, no dispatcher, no routing.
Same-day or next-day for most calls. Emergency stinging-insect situations and real-estate WDI deadlines get priority.
We identify the species, locate entry points, and find the source — not just the symptom.
Written recommendation, straightforward pricing, no obligation. If you don't need treatment, we'll tell you.
Most bat calls start the same way: you walk into a room and something is flying. The immediate questions — is it dangerous, are there more, what do I do — are the right ones to ask, and they deserve straight answers.
The most common scenario is a single bat that found its way into a living space, bedroom, or small attic through a gap in the structure. In Emmitsburg, that gap is often easier to find than in newer construction. The town’s historic downtown properties, older farmhouses, and stone and brick buildings tend to have deteriorating mortar joints, roofline separations, and soffit gaps that newer builds simply don’t. A bat doesn’t need much — an opening the width of a finger is enough for a little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), the most common species encountered in Maryland homes, to slip through.
The public health dimension is real and worth taking seriously: bats can carry rabies, and unlike most wildlife, a bat bite can go unnoticed. If there’s any doubt about contact, the Frederick County Health Department is the right call for medical guidance — not a pest control company. What Pest Shield can tell you is whether you have a single-entry situation or signs of something larger, and what the structural vulnerabilities look like.
60+ years of combined experience. Tell us what you’re seeing — we’ll come look, no obligation.
Troy is a true professional. He accommodated my schedule by coming after hours to do an inspection. I had gotten a “free inspection” from another BIG, WELL-KNOWN company and they had me believing I had live termites. I was suspicious when they didn’t show up for the initial treatment, and more so when I got conflicting information from people at their company. Turns out I didn’t have termites, and Troy was straight up, didn’t try to rip me off with a service I didn’t need. He SAVED me $1400 and I will surely use him in the future if I ever have a pest problem of any kind! Go Pest Shield!
Marion Entwisle · June 2014 Read on HomeAdvisor →
Pest Shield is a great company to work with. Troy is very knowledgeable and won’t do services you don’t need. He does a thorough job the first time so you don’t have to keep calling him back.
Jim Frizen · April 2020 Read on Google →
Troy gave me honest feedback and even suggested that I didn’t really need a treatment at this time, which saved me money. He inspected my basement and explained that there is old damage from beetles and also what the limitations of treatment were. Very helpful and informative and reasonably priced.
Anna West · August 2022 Read on Google →
General pest & rodent control
Pest Shield handles single bat extraction from living spaces and small attic situations, paired with a thorough entry-point inspection. When you call, Troy or a technician comes to the property, assesses the situation, removes the bat, and identifies how it got in. The inspection covers the roofline, soffits, chimney, fascia boards, and any other structural gaps relevant to the entry point — the goal is to understand what happened, not just respond to it.
Entry-point identification is a core part of every bat call. Knowing where the bat came in tells you whether this was a one-time event or a sign of a structural vulnerability that will produce the same problem again. Troy will walk you through what he finds.
One thing Pest Shield will tell you plainly if the inspection warrants it: if there are signs of a roosting colony — guano accumulation, multiple entry points with staining, sounds of movement in the walls over time — that situation requires large colony exclusion work involving one-way exclusion devices and Maryland DNR processes. Pest Shield does not perform that work and will refer you to a wildlife control cooperator who does. That’s not a limitation to apologize for — it’s the honest answer, and it’s consistent with how Pest Shield operates across every service they offer.
Bat removal calls are treated as urgent. Same-day response is available, including on weekends. If you have a bat in your home right now, call (301) 829-0060 — you’ll reach someone who can tell you whether Pest Shield is the right fit for your situation and get you scheduled. The initial inspection is free. For broader pest control in Emmitsburg, Pest Shield covers the full range of pest pressures common to the area.
Owner
Founded Pest Shield in 2011 after years as a pest management contractor on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Around 35 years in pest management. Personally handles or leads the majority of service calls.
Pest Management Specialist
Field technician handling residential and commercial service calls across Frederick, Carroll, and Montgomery counties.
Pest Management Specialist
Field technician handling residential and commercial service calls across the service area.
Our Entomologist
Consulting entomologist on species identification, conducive conditions, and treatment strategy for difficult cases.
Emmitsburg sits at the northern edge of Frederick County, near the Pennsylvania border along US-15, with Catoctin Mountain to the east and open farmland in most directions. The town’s mix of historic downtown buildings, older wood-frame and stone farmhouses, and rural properties puts it squarely in the part of Maryland where bat entry calls are most common — older construction, more gaps, and abundant bat habitat nearby.
The structural characteristics of Emmitsburg’s older housing stock — deteriorating mortar in stone and brick facades, aging soffit and fascia boards, roofline separations in farmhouses — create more entry-point vulnerability than newer builds. Add the high insect density that comes with agricultural surroundings and Catoctin Mountain’s wooded edge, and you have conditions that attract bats close to homes. Late summer dispersal of young bats from nearby maternity colonies makes single-bat intrusion a realistic seasonal concern for homeowners throughout the area — one that often surfaces alongside other seasonal pest pressures like mosquito activity and tick exposure in the same wooded and agricultural settings.
Don’t try to catch or handle the bat with your bare hands. If you can safely confine it to one room by closing doors, do that — it makes removal easier. If anyone in the home may have had contact with the bat, including while sleeping, call the Frederick County Health Department before anything else; they handle rabies exposure questions. For removal, call Pest Shield at (301) 829-0060 — same-day response is available, and the initial inspection is free.
Bats can carry rabies, and the concern is taken seriously by public health authorities because a bat bite can be small enough to go unnoticed. If there’s any possibility of contact — including with a sleeping person, a child, or a pet — the Frederick County Health Department is the right call for medical guidance; that’s outside the scope of pest control. If there was no contact and you simply need the bat removed and the entry point identified, that’s what Pest Shield handles.
A single bat in a living space is usually a stray — a young bat that dispersed from a nearby maternity colony and found a gap in your roofline or soffit. Signs of a roosting colony are different: repeated bat sightings over multiple nights, sounds of movement or scratching in walls or the attic over time, guano accumulation near entry points, or staining around gaps. Pest Shield’s inspection will look for these indicators and tell you honestly what the evidence suggests. If it points to a colony, that requires a different approach than Pest Shield performs, and they’ll tell you that directly.
Pest Shield handles single bat extraction from living spaces and small attic situations, including entry-point inspection and identification. Large colony exclusion — which involves one-way exclusion device installation and Maryland DNR processes — is outside Pest Shield’s scope, and they’ll refer you to a wildlife control cooperator if the inspection reveals that’s what you’re dealing with. That referral is part of the honest assessment, not a gap in service.
Yes, in practical terms. Emmitsburg’s historic downtown buildings, older stone and brick farmhouses, and aging wood-frame construction tend to develop the kinds of gaps — deteriorating mortar joints, roofline separations, failing soffit boards — that bats use to enter structures. A little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) can fit through an opening roughly the width of a finger, and big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus), which commonly overwinter in structures, need only slightly more. Newer construction with tighter building envelopes presents fewer opportunities. If you’re in an older Emmitsburg property and have had one bat inside, the entry-point inspection is worth doing to understand what the structure looks like and whether there are other vulnerabilities.
