Bats in the Belfry

I'm not sure why, but for whatever reason I completely ignored the fact that my contractor told me that there were 50 pounds of bat guano in the attic when they demo'd the ceilings. Maybe it was just more than my brain could handle. 

Needless to say, I was disappointed when he told me, because not only did he not call to tell me, but he literally tossed out a very valuable commodity. Yes, bat poo is valuable! But it's gone and there is no use dwelling on that.

Looks like this is where they're coming in...

Months ago, we happened to do a walk through of the house and when we got up to the attic, this is what we found.

Oh boy, should have considered that where there's bat poo, there are bats.

Isn't it cute? A cute little family of baby bats all snuggled in together cute as can be! So we let it be. Because we weren't living in the house. Then I read up on bats, and found that like bees, bats don't just move out. 

So I bought them a little house, and I thought, ok, I will put the house on the side of the house, sprinkle some bat pheromones inside and they'll move right in. 

And then one day, my husband came down from the attic and said, the bats are gone!

So I ran upstairs to see, and indeed they were! And just as I began to turn towards the stairs, what do I see but....

I'm sorry, but a bat hanging upside down like Count Dracula is not anything close to cute. I got the hell out of the attic as fast and as quietly as I possibly could and went straight downstairs to give hub the news.

Then I started calling certified bat experts in the area. Absolutely nobody returned our calls for a week, so we decided that we were going to tackle this problem on our own. In a humane way, of course, as bats are extremely beneficial to the environment and are a perfect compliment to a farm property. We had to do it this weekend, because we were about to have a house full of designers, contractors and subs.

We hatched out a plan: I would scoop up the bat poo if Jesse would risk his life capturing the bat. He would place a box over the bat, wearing thick gloves so as not to possibly catch rabies, and slide a thick sheet of card stock under the box to capture the bat. Then he would drive the bat very far away. While he is driving the bat far away, I would seal all the holes in the attic so the bat would not ever return.

Then a bat guy called me back. He said, "well, i'm not actually a bat guy, but I used to play with them when I was a kid, so I'm not afraid. I'll take him out to where I live and let him out. But you should know that he will probably just fly back to your house." I said, "that's ok, as long as he doesn't come back for a couple of days." Then he said, "you could also just sit outside your house and see where the bat flies out and then patch the holes at that time." But I wasn't planning on being in the house past dusk. We don't have power, and it's a little scary up in that attic.

Then the second bat guy called me back. He said, "sorry I didn't call back but suddenly I'm getting all these calls about bats." That's when I realized that my husband was calling all of the same guys on the department of fish and wildlife website as I was. I admitted to actually calling him several times and then we got down to business. I told him that someone was already coming out and we were covered. He said, "don't believe anything anyone tells you, they're all lying if they say they can take care of your bats. They will always come back and they will come into your attic and if you plug up the holes, they will die in there and stink up your whole house. And if they don't die, they will fly throughout your house, terrorizing everyone inside until they find their way out."

Wow, that was kind of stressful.

So we called the first guy back and he came right on over, walked up to the attic and plucked it right off the wall.

Yep it was dead. Not only that, but it was a dead baby bat. he said that sometimes they just don't make it. So the family must have flown off without him. He was a super nice guy! And you can see he's having a good chuckle over the whole thing (silly city folks)!

We took it as an opportunity to educate the kids.