Feeling Batty

Imagine, you are sound asleep when you are awoken to the light your husband turned on. When you finally can speak and open your eye you ask, “have you lost your mind it is 2 am?” Then he speaks that dreaded word – “There is a bat”. Well, I have been down this road several times. He knows my next move as I pull the covers over my head. He knows his next move also. As he proceeds to get the bat out of our room, he begins closing the doors to all rooms as the bat heads down the hall. Once in the living room, he opens the sliding back door and the front door and turns on all the inside lights. It flies out into the darkness.

Bats do not want to come into your house. Often it is a young back still trying to navigate itself. In our case, it came through a dog door in our slider. Most of the weather stripping had worn down. All it needs is about ¾ of an inch to get in. We have since replaced the dog door with a double insulated one which we installed in our wall. It isn’t our first rodeo with this. We have had them drop in through the chimney and through our attic via the whole house fan.

If you have a bat in the house. They are more scared than you are. They do make a chittering noise to let you know they are afraid. You can use a box, container, or net to capture it to free it, but often opening the doors and directly with a broom will lead it out of your home, hopefully. They are not good at finding their way out of your house on their own. If they disappear – they probably haven’t left. They are still in your house somewhere.

They prefer living in dead or old trees. We have bat boxes in our backyard. Bats are great for eating mosquitos! Rabid bats are extremely rare. The United States and Canada report one or two a year. With the trillion of bats out there – those are pretty good odds it safe.