i’m pretty sure the bat i chased down last night flying around our house – the fifth bat in the house this week – until he tired and then snatched with my (gloved) hand looked at me like i was crazy as i tossed him out the front door and told him to not come back because he wouldn’t like me when i was angry.

now that i think of it, maybe i should tag the next one to see if it’s the same one returning over and over again. unlikely, but i suppose not impossible.

i can’t figure out how they are getting in, or why the sudden influx after five years of being bat free.

well, The Great Bat Invasion may have come to an end since we decided we had finally had enough and had them all exterminated.

ha! just kidding. no, we didn’t have them killed, but we did call in the wisconsin bat specialists who specialize in getting the bats out without resorting to death and dismemberment by putting one way “doors”, called excluders, on all the points of entry that they can find and keep them out by sealing up all possible points they might use to try to get back into the house. after the work was done we were advised that’s it not unusual to find a rogue bat or two who couldn’t find their way out of the house, but if we didn’t have any visitors after a week, they had more than likely all moved on to a more hospitable house. i’m almost a little sad to report that it appears that they’ve all left without even saying goodbye.

interestingly, they told us that even though they we were exiting through the chimney at dusk, they were more than likely not living in it and that it’s far more typical that they enter through other access points and crawl throughout the structure of the house until they find someplace cozy to sleep and then enter the chimney through a hole in the mortar ( er. i guess that means no fires this year. ) of the chimney for a speedy exit at night. indeed, they did find loads of guano near the gaps where the dormers meet up with the roof which they theorized were the most likely points of entry.

sadly, we learned that one of our neighbors has taken to putting out poison to kill the bats that are getting in her house, so hopefully they don’t all decide to go next door!

lets just say you had not one, but two, bats sequestered into a corner of a “built in” area in your toddler’s playroom, which is a recessed cedar space that I suppose might be used to put in an entertainment center if you’re into that sort of thing. they are wedged in the corner of a space that’s only about 18 inches wide and they are about 8 feet off the ground, so even if you’re tall it’s still a bit of a stretch to get to them and since the space is so narrow it seems likely that they will GET TANGLED IN YOUR HAIR!

so, smarty pants, how do you get them out while minimizing trauma to yourself and the bats ( i.e. any solution that involves smeared bat guts on the inside of the space is not an option 🙂 ). oh, and they seem pretty content to sit where they are, so just banging on the wall isn’t an option.

so, kris and i were discussing The Bat Invasion and were slowly coming to peace with the fact that in all likelihood there were more bats in the house or freely coming and going by whatever means necessary, since after we found the bats in the fan, we discovered new, fresh guano in odin’s bedroom and little bits here and there scattered around the house. but at least we could find some comfort in the fact that it seemed like, for the most part, they were happy to keep to themselves.

as we headed up a very dark stairwell for bed, kris let out a little screech and whispered ( so as not to wake odin ), “a bat just flew by my ear!”. sigh. so we quickly turned on the lights and scanned around for signs of a bat. nothing. i wondered aloud if possibly maybe she thought she felt a bat because we were just talking about them and the stairwell really was very dark and spooky. yes, i know, it really was the kind of comment that i probably should have left to myself. moments later she brought odin into our room on the chance that the bat she was sure she saw was hiding out in his room.

the following morning, bright and early, i walked down the stairs towards the bathroom, yawning and wondering if there really was a bat. as i rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked down and took a double take and then a triple.

a big brown bat was swimming in the toilet.

i kid you not. his head was above water and he was swimming around in slow circles. i quickly closed the lid, relieved – ahem – that i didn’t have to do anything that required sitting on the toilet in the middle of the night and i pondered what to do next.

at first, i thought it might have injured itself or maybe was on the way to drowning, but i could hear it trying to flap its wings with the toilet lid down while i took a shower and finally concluded that if it were trying to drown itself it probably wasn’t going to have the job finished before i went to work. i tossed out the idea of just leaving him in the toilet until he met his end, but kris voted down that proposal. then, and remember this is before i’ve had any coffee, i thought i might be able to scoop him out with a spatula, but after a few attempts, i realized that the chances of him happily sitting on the end of a spatula were vanishingly small. perhaps i could grab him with a plastic over my hand and close up the bag until i got outside! perfect! luckily, i remembered that bats do actually have teeth they were probably capable of piercing a plastic bag. so, what to do?

i have to admit i was a little impressed with myself as i macgyvered a pair of oven mitts into bat removal protection gear.

the bat was not happy. and i’m fairly certain that he was schreeching something awful outside of the frequency range human ears can hear.

we walked outside and i calmly told him that that he better go off and tell all his friends that if i saw him or any of his kind in my house again then, well, then things were going to get ugly.

you might think after our experience with Mr. Big Brown Bat that we might think twice about leaving a window lacking a screen open all night. yes, you might think that.

and you might think that after we left the window open and came downstairs in the morning to find little poop droppings all over the place that we might be a quick to suspect flying mammals. yes, you might think that.

instead, kris wondered how we could have suddenly fell victim to an invasion of mice that liked to poop a lot. i added helpfully, “yeah, jeez. it’s not like there’s enough food laying around to attract a marauding army of poopy mice,” as kris turned the fan off and moved it out of the window.

after cleaning up the excrement, we noticed not one but two bats inside the fan! one was dead, but the other was alive. how and when they got there is a bit of a mystery, as we’re fairly certain they weren’t in the fan when kris moved it out of the window. my guess is that the dead one tried to leave just after she switched off the fan?

of course, the looming question is how many other bats are sleeping soundly in little nooks and crannies all around the house, just waiting for night to come.