JANUARY 23, 2024 – By sheer will I came to terms with the undeniable fact that what I’d wanted to believe was the bat was nothing more than a black sock. Meanwhile, Beth called me from back home, safe from nature. Nonetheless, she is our veteran cabin mouse killer and bat battler. Some eight years ago she’d established her bat bona fides. Her weapon of choice had been a window screen. She mangled the screen but wrangled the bat.
“Look behind the cabinet up in the loft,” she said. “That’s where the bat wound up way back when.”
“Odds are it’s not the same bat,” I wanted to say. But her idea was a start. A desirable hang-out for one bat might be attractive to its progeny. She added that until the bat was located and removed, she would not be staying at the cabin—nor would our infant grandson and his parents, who were planning to spend an overnight with us there later in the week.
Now doubly motivated, I donned my Quixote armor for the umpteenth time, proceeded to the loft, and prepared to capture the bat, rabid or otherwise. As a human, however, I pridefully summoned a higher level of reasoning than the impulsivity that propels a flighty little brown bat. I recalled the age old imperative of the ancient Greek sage, Hippocrates: “Do no harm.”
In the present context that meant, Don’t just grab the cabinet by the corner and shift it suddenly, rattling its contents, and shaking the guano out of the bat clinging to the backside. No. Try that and the bat will be disturbed and fly about, evading capture and settling in furtively somewhere never to be found. The better—Hippocratic—approach was to step toward the cabinet stealthily, shining (silently) the phone light into the dark abyss between the back of the cabinet and the wall. If the bat was there, I thought, I’d quickly throw the mosquito netting (now added to my arsenal) over the whole cabinet and . . . go from there.
However good in theory, the plan was problematic in application: the black space between wall and cabinet was too narrow for the light to penetrate. I had to inch closer . . . and closer. There! Now, finally, I could aim the light beam into the gap occupied by the bat. And peering back at me—I swear!—were two beady little bat eyes. Reflexively, I snapped back to ponder the unmistakable image. Had I really see them? Or was this another “black sock” moment; an instance of confirmation bias?
I repeated the process . . . “Yes! Definitely two beady eyes.”
I then thought better of fooling around with the mosquito netting. I developed another theory grounded in the fabricated self-assurance of rationalization, to-wit: the bat’s usual seasonal torpor had been disturbed by the record warm temperatures of December; with the more recent advent of colder air, the confused bat had been attracted to the cabin warmth exposed upon my arrival the day before; initially frightened by its shared occupancy with a human, the bat had flitted about until it realized my harmless broom wasn’t a lethal tennis racquet; once the creature had settled down, it settled in—on the back of the cabinet—there to hang in torpor . . . until . . . spring perhaps?
If I just left well enough alone—if I did no harm . . .
I backed down the stairs and conducted a Google search. At the speed of light, or nearly so, I located “1st Choice Pest Solutions” headquartered 90 miles away but touting an intergalactic service area. Soon I was on the phone with a technician—Rob—who would be within striking distance by noon the next day. The bat’s peace was now on borrowed time.
With smugness unique to our species, I was convinced that I’d cornered the prey that Rob, the embodiment of Special Forces, could seize with little effort and big results. The interior space of our cabin would soon be liberated from the intrusion of dark, scary, creepy, disgusting, guano-bearing, possibly rabid . . . nature. (On a more leisurely basis, we could deal with perennial spiders and seasonal insects, along with all the dust and dirt of nature that drift in through doorways and window openings.) We the people, the rightful owners and occupants of the Red Cabin could once again enjoy the freedom and liberty of living the American dream inside a cabin in the woods—in seclusion from the madding crowd of other humans.
Rob the Batman struck me as a seasoned warrior. He was confident, well spoken, knowledgeable. He knew his bats, their habits and instincts. He also knew his construction and “construction gaps,” as he called them; holes and openings in almost any residential structure, even of the highest quality, through which bats can enter a house. I asked and he answered a gazillion questions. But I was now feeling better educated about bats, I was also feeling more ignorant about . . . the nature that surrounds us, that allows us to exist in the first place.
In addition to scheduling an immediate visit to capture the bat, Rob seized the opportunity to pitch me on “bat-proofing” the cabin early this spring. Under the circumstances, of course, I was an easy mark. Just how easy he didn’t fully appreciate.
About 10 years ago I’d had a client whose young family resided in a large old farmhouse that was being renovated. In the course of the project, bats flew out of the woodwork; or more precisely, out of spaces between the studs. Lots of bats. So may, in fact, that a bat expert who was retained estimated they numbered as many as 20,000. The entire structure had to be razed.[1]
Trust me, even taking into account the felicitous role of insurance, I was shell-shocked by the aforementioned experience. Consequently, if for nothing more than peace of mind, I will readily pour additional funds into our cabin “money pit” to protect our property from becoming a movie set for The Bats—a “based on a true story” sequel to The Birds.
A day later . . . After several failures of GPS, Rob eventually found his way to our Shangri-La and followed my directions to the hidden key. Letting himself in, he proceeded to the bat perch behind the cabinet in the loft. He told me he’d call back once he’d captured the critter and “eliminated” it.
Mind you, Rob is not a cold-blooded killer of the warm-blooded. He respects his prey, and in fact, understands the role bats play in the vast network of interdependence that sustains nature and ultimately, humankind. His modus operandi “encourages” bats to exist in the wild, not in the unnatural world fabricated by us humans in all our cleverness. He’s sensitive, however, to the risk of rabies, and counsels customers to have intruder bats tested for the horrid disease—just in case.
When I asked him how one tells a rabid bat from a healthy one, he said, “You can’t without testing.” But he also acknowledged that of all the numberless bats he’s encountered—and “eliminated”—over the years, only one tested positive for rabies, and that was a million miles, or at least 100, away from our neck of the woods.
I was feeling better—or maybe not—with the knowledge that as Rob explained, “Almost every house has bats, but since for the most part bats hang out in spaces between outer and inner surfaces, people never know they’re living with bats.” He further informed me that in winter bats go into torpor, semi-hibernation. “They’re generally sleeping,” he said, “not flying about and scaring people. And during the rest of the year, they need to eat and survive, and they do that by flying around outside at night, catching mosquitoes, and sleeping by day, so again, they’re not going to disturb you inside.”
It all sounded good, except . . . I thought about the estimated 20,000 bats in my erstwhile client’s house and the risk of disease from all the guano. I placated myself with the idea that for $2,500 we could “bat proof” our cabin—“guaranteed,” subject to fine print.
A half hour passed, then an hour. I was well entrenched back in the city, safe from nature, distracted by the demands and diversions of our made-up world. Amidst a short break in the action, I suddenly remembered: we had a cabin in the woods; there was a bat in the cabin—along with a batman tasked with the “easy” capture of said bat. But said batman had not yet called to report victory.
If in fact I’d seen two beady eyes of a bat hanging on the backside of the cabinet, the eyes and the bat had slipped—er, flitted—away before Rob had arrived on the scene. In the time that followed, he told me, he’d turned our cabin “upside down” in search of the bat. I knew that his “upside down” was more thorough than my version. His conclusion, which I adopted, was that the bat had disappeared from the interior of the cabin by the same opening through which it had appeared.
Menander observed 2,300 years before our day, “Time cures all wounds.” Its corollary, “Time dissipates all memory,” is likewise the grand salve of the human condition. In the present instance, the image of a bat flying like some cheap toy of terror sold on Halloween.com faded with each passing day. Our son and daughter-in-law yawned at my telling of the tale. “So what time can we leave for the cabin?” was their ultimately dismissive response. Even Beth, who’d thrown down the gauntlet and threatened to stay at a hotel at the Lac Courte d’Oreilles Casino 10 miles away, threw in the towel on her fears. We wound up enjoying a wonderful time at the cabin—without any sign of a bat.
I began to wonder if $2,500 would be money down the drain and into our septic system—until the (faded) image of 20,000 bats darkened the interior of my cranium.
The long and short of it, I decided, was that if the creatures great and small that occupy “nature” outside (or inside) our cabin could experience for an instant, human fear and ignorance—or worse, contempt—in reaction to “nature,” those critters would colonize Mars long before we ever could.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] My role was to negotiate a claim under the client’s insurance policy. Remarkably, the insurance company agreed to cover much of the loss.
