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Look! Up in the rafters!

It’s a bat.

It’s a lousy cellphone photo of a bat, I admit, but I was trying not to scare him with the flash gun. The cleaning lady at work discovered him while dusting. He’s been there for two days now, apparently happy as a clam. A teeny, tiny wingéd clam.

Bats are protected here (there too, I think), so we had to call in a bat specialist, who advised us to turn off the lights, open the doors and windows and go away. On a Friday afternoon? I think I can manage that.

Have a good weekend, all!

Comments


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: September 21, 2018, 7:53 pm

Heh – you really don’t want to be in the room, especially if it’s small, when the little bugger takes wing and you experience their collision avoidance system and high G turn capabilities first hand.

It’s, exciting.

Recalling one that got into the bed room around about 50 years ago.

Might have been named Bat Kavanaugh!

and might not have been. 😛

Is this one, perhaps, named Buttman?


Comment from Mrs. Peel
Time: September 21, 2018, 8:18 pm

What happens if you do all that and a second bat comes in?


Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: September 21, 2018, 8:37 pm

So, how did you get in contact with this Batman fellow ?


Comment from ExpressoBold
Time: September 21, 2018, 9:25 pm

“… turn off the lights, open the doors and windows and go away.”
~
Sounds like a prescription for a Bat Party Open House Event.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: September 21, 2018, 10:17 pm

Trust me, it is not by any means the only mad old bat in that place.

Just sayin’…


Comment from Steve Skubinna
Time: September 21, 2018, 10:50 pm

Bats are common in my corner of the PNW. Many people around here put up bat houses on their property.

Yeah, actual tiny houses for bats to nest in. They are much flatter than bird houses, with a slot at the top for them to enter and leave through.

They do supposedly control flying insects. The location of my house is not especially afflicted by them though. Maybe I already have enough bats around the house.


Comment from AliceH
Time: September 21, 2018, 11:27 pm

Around here, bat houses are common accessories on barns – I see them most often below the eaves and just over the pulley wheel above the hay loft door/window. Like Steve says, bats are welcomed for their volume insect eating.


Comment from Bob
Time: September 22, 2018, 1:07 am

There’s lots of bats around here, which means we come across sick ones on the ground fairly often. Since they are a vector for rabies, the animal control folks go into a panic. The Earth-worshippers want to try to save them from being collected and killed.


Comment from Bloke in California
Time: September 22, 2018, 4:33 am

Catch him Derry!


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: September 22, 2018, 1:35 pm

There is a bat cave not far from me that has so many bats, they show up on the weather radar when they take flight!
http://www.batcon.org/our-work/regions/usa-canada/protect-mega-populations/bracken-cave


Comment from BJM
Time: September 22, 2018, 5:26 pm

We has bats too…little brown Valley bats (Myotis lucifugus).

Watching them catch flying insects on the security cameras is fascinating. What is not fascinating is the mess at the front door where they choose to hangout and eat the big stuff; moths, grasshoppers, etc.

So I hung old CD’s on strings around the doorway and leave the light on…so far that seems to work.

Our bats migrate down the Central Valley to caves in the Los Banos hills to hibernate. That’s a long trip for such small critters.

It’s Fall Equinox today so they’ll be heading south soon.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 22, 2018, 7:05 pm

As a point of information, she was a brown long eared bat. Female, young and fairly seriously undernourished. She’s gone into bat hospital to be fed up, after which she will be released back into our general area as she is probably a local.


Comment from Mitchell
Time: September 23, 2018, 4:01 pm

I want a house with a belfry just so I can stock bats in it.


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: September 24, 2018, 12:52 pm

Flying mice!

Not really, of course, but where do you think the title Die Fledermaus came from?

When I visited Carlsbad Caverns in May years ago, they mentioned the famous bat flights of July evenings as a special event. I’ve always wanted to go back and see them emerging in dark flocks from the caverns.


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: September 24, 2018, 3:04 pm

Wagner!

Der Fliegender Fledermausmann!

Hope the little flying mouse does well.


Comment from Can’t Hark My Cry
Time: September 24, 2018, 4:13 pm

Wolfus Aurelius: We lived in Phoenix when I was between the ages of 3 and 7, and did a lot of travelling in the Southwest–including a visit to Carlsbad, during which we saw the bats leaving the cave in the evening (so, I guess it must have been July 🙂 ). It was … memorable. As can be shown by the fact that I still remember it almost 60 years later: not in any detail, but the image of a swiftly moving cloud composed entirely of bats always springs to mind when someone mentions bats!


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 24, 2018, 8:09 pm

Carlsbad is one of my most vivid memories of childhood, Summer vacation 1967. I’ll never forget what they called ‘Chanel bat’ — the smell of all that accumulated guano.


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: September 24, 2018, 9:26 pm

Dang Stoaty. I was at Carlsbad in the summer of 1967. My biggest memory was brushing against the cactus that throws its needles. Cholla. I was 15 and cussed like a biker chick and my mother didn’t bat an eye. I don’t know how I did it—and it was while we were watching the bats fly out in the evening—but I hit the cactus with the fleshy inner part of my elbow. My mother was a nurse, so she patiently pulled the needles out with her tweezers, and kept wiping up the blood with alcohol. Then she dosed me with an antihistamine. She couldn’t get all the needles out, and that spot hurt for a long time, but I guess my body finally absorbed the needles.


Comment from Jon
Time: September 26, 2018, 8:04 pm

My parents set out a bat house but it has yet to attract visitors.
Ironically, one got into the human house many moons ago, and when it joined us in the kitchen there was much panic to be found as it flew about. (It was eventually gently captured and released to the outside)

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