A friend of mine recently saw a bat on his screened-in back porch. He ducked out onto the “porch where said bat was pinwheeling in the air madly,” opened the door, and the creature departed.
From having bats in our house EVERY YEAR from 2002-2007, I find that my racquetball racket was good at stunning bats without hurting them, putting a cardboard box over the creature, some sort of plastic or metal tray underneath, take ’em outside, then kick the box away.
My friend expressed concern that with brown bats near extinction in the Northeast due to ‘white nose’ fungus, it was against his nature to use such a tool to down a bat. But another guy agreed that “swat, stun, put outside, leave ’em alone, they fly away.” The Wikihow says: “A tennis racket is an appropriate tool to catch one in flight, but use gently.” You needn’t swing the racket. For whatever reason, a racket screws up their echolocation and they practically run into it.
While it is true that if you do get bitten & you don’t catch the culprit the health authority will insist on you getting rabies shots – I can say with painful recall – it seems that fewer bats are rabid than was generally thought.
Three days after that discussion, at about 3:30 a.m., the Daughter got up to go to the bathroom but was startled by a noise she feared was a bat. It is true that one can hear the bats outside, and they sound like they’re inside the room. So we prepare, with head covered, hands covered (I had oven mitts, she rubber gloves), arms and legs covered. We closed all the other doors in the house.
We meticulously went through the towels hanging up, the bathroom shade, and the shower curtain; no bat. At least when she IS confronted by the creature, she’ll be prepared.
How exciting, Roger! You see and hear far more wildlife than we have here in the Netherlands! May be the rest of Europe has more interesting news to tell in the field of wild animals.
I wish you a wonderful week .
Wil, ABCW Team.
LOL! An neighbor where we used to live saw a bat hanging upside-down from her fireplace damper through the glass doors. She put on her son’s football helmet and some welding gloves and pulled it out of the fireplace and released it outside!
Man, we had bats every August in Attica, NY. (Yes, ATTIC-a, ha ha) They were generally babies who had left the shelter only to find themselves lost at dusk. They’d head for whatever light they could find.
I would get major PTSD freakouts from their visits, shaking, whimpering. I screamed once and my daughter, Riley, said, “Mom, you’re scaring the bat.” They are important to the ecosystem, and we made every attempt to get them out safely, but sometimes they got caught squeezing through our window fans. Plastic blades. Thunk, thunk, SQUEAK SQUEAK… no way around it, they had to be euthenized because their wings were broken from the fans. So sad.
Draculamy
We had a bat in here once; it found its way in after a sudden microburst storm, and was in one of our bathrooms trying to figure out how to get out. That was a surprise! We didn’t know it was there until morning.
Roger – thanks for directing my attention here. Very glad to see that very few bats have diseases – that was my suspicion and now I can show my wife the evidence! This is especially welcome because the #@!%! critter (or his cousin) was back tonight. Sigh.