JULY 29, 2019 – At midnight Saturday I’d just turned off the downstairs lights. The faint glow of an upstairs nightlight was all that guided my way to the steps. My wife had retired earlier and was fast asleep in the second floor bedroom overlooking the open space below where I’d been reading.
Suddenly appeared a bat flitting across the upper portion of the room and into the space above the second floor loft. The creature confirmed its presence by several erratic passes across the space.
With wings of my own I flew up the steps and blew into the bedroom, closed the door and shut the casement windows above the area where I’d been reading peacefully less than a minute before.
“There’s a bat in the house!” I said, waking my wife.
Holed up in the bedroom and peering out the window, we plotted our next move. We then swung into action.
If a video of our efforts existed on YouTube, it would have gone viral. The reader’s imagination can barely approach the reality of our failed improvisation.
Simply put: Google will get you only so far in catching a bat inside your house. The most helpful site said, “There are no easy techniques.” I did learn quite a lot about bats, however, in my late-night online crash course.
Bats go into a kind of torpor during the day. That’s when you’re most likely to catch a bat by way of any of several methods. At night, however, it’s a different story. That’s when they flit about catching insects. But unless you’re good with a big butterfly net, a tennis racket or an air-borne blanket, good luck. Your best bet is to wait until after dawn, when the bat returns to its daytime hibernation.
Bats hang on walls so as to be better positioned for take-off: they fly by dropping off the wall, catching air, then flapping their wings to stay aloft. It’s much harder for a bat to take-off from the floor or ground.
Very few bats are rabid, and one expert I phoned the next morning told me that a bat that can fly circles around the room (and you!)—as our bat proved it could do—is definitely not rabid. But in case my wife reads this, I don’t want her to freak out about other diseases that can be carried in bat guano.
After losing two hours of sleep, we called it quits and resumed our quixotic mission the next morning. I convinced myself that the bat had returned to the wild via one of two screenless window openings we’d created. My wife’s skepticism was validated when the bat reappeared, flitting about, the following night at 1:00 a.m. Again, we opened two windows and removed the screens (but this time, in the dark). We saw one pass soon thereafter but nothing more for over another half hour.
Time will tell whether we need to fall back on “Three’s the charm.”
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
