Oh bats! [housekeepery]

[rebeccmeister]

When I woke up this morning, there was some noise and confusion in the dining room, which turned out to be two bats, flying around!

I have no idea how they got in. I also don't know how successful I was at getting them back outside. I managed to get one out onto the front porch, but it eventually stopped flying around and found a really good hiding place for itself among the thousands of cardboard boxes piled up. The other one might have similarly found a hiding spot in the front hall closet.

I don't know for sure because I was feeling the time crunch of trying to get out the door for rowing practice. I'm not sure how useful it would have been to try tearing the entire house apart to get at the bats. It seemed better to just leave them be, especially because as best I understand it, humans should generally avoid handling bats directly.

Have you ever had bats in your house? What did you do?

Comments

[graydon]

Had bats in this house twice; the first time was a pair of confused Big Brown Bats (Big only relative to the Little Brown Bat) that flew at my face when I opened the shower curtain. I was able to open the upstairs door to nowhere and shoo them out it without incident.

Second time was a bat roosting in the looped up electrical cord of the vacuum cleaner; I initially thought it was a cat toy and dropped it when it wiggled. It got put outside with precautions but I noticed an hour later that I had a skin break on that hand with no other explanation and the area around the skin break was becoming inflamed. A trip to emergency for rabies shots followed. (There are four, then three boosters at intervals.)

My landlord had a guy in to fix the roof quite promptly.

[rebeccmeister]

Yeah, I was concerned about potential rabies exposure + the hassle of having to go through the rabies shot sequence (better than rabies, of course!), which is a big part of why I didn't try to get any closer to the bats.

[graydon]

While I should never want to suggest not taking rabies precautions, these days, one might also observe that bats have all manner of remarkable diseases.

Being Patient Zero is always best avoided!