This cute little bugger is one of 5 (Five) bats that appeared inside our house in the woods this week. I caught four of them with towels. Like a matador.
Had to have rabies shots, five on the first go-round, and one every few days afterwards.
Making things a little more complicated about solving our bat problems, I found that bats are federally protected (like bankers and hedge fund managers), so you can't just go up in their roosting area and nuke them.
I know, I know. They do a million wonderful things for the environment. All those insects they scoop up and all that.
This is apparently bat season, when the young bats are flailing around, making the bat roost a chaotic place and causing them to make bad decisions about where to go hunting. Like our living room.
You have to plug the places they enter the house and put a one way flap on their entry points into the house. A flap door so they can exit but not return. All this is very complicated and expensive, and the bat people who do the work are in big demand, so there's a wait before anything final can be done.
Meanwhile, no bats have reappeared in the last few days after we plugged a few suspicious spots around the fireplace. But we still duck and cover when a moth flutters nearby.
Naturally, it's all good material, and it just so happens I've got a dandy way to use all my new bat knowledge in the Thorn novel I'm working on at the moment.
That's one of the great things about writing these books. No matter how bad things might get in the real world, I find myself almost immediately grateful to have such good new material for fiction.
3 comments:
I used to be a key-holder for my employer's premises back in the early 90's. We had a bat infestation which meant I got called out because the bats set off the alarm when the motion sensors picked them up flying. I thought it was great because, I lived locally and I got £10 every time I was called out. It stopped being funny after about the fourth time in the one week that I had to get up and attend.
We ended up disabling the alarm, and I eventually got some undisturbed sleep!
I think they relocated of their own accord after a while. We couldn't use pest control methods, as they are protected in the UK also.
If you contract rabies...I wonder how that will influence your writing?
whew ... reading all of that wore me out ... congrats on the anniversary ... hard to believe that many years! Enjoyed catching up with you, little bro
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