Hi! It's me again. It's been a long time.
Honestly, I have about two dozen drafts written up about various topics, but almost all of them dig deep into the history of the anti-vax movement and where the dark money to continue to push it via media comes from, why banning abortions is a terrible idea, how we have failed at being stewards of the planet, etc.
Lot of things that got me fired up, depressed, and generally unfocused. And honestly, you probably don't want to hear most of these rants anyway. Maybe someday in person, we can talk about them, but via a blog, I don't know that it helps much. (Maybe I'll circle back, never know)
I also started writing up my Hawaii travel blog. I will return to that and finish it someday soon, but the post vacation insanity has kept me from having the focus to really do it justice.
So today, I instead naturally want to talk about bats.
We bought an old house because we love the beauty of buildings before aluminum siding became the norm. We like the layouts. We like the weird modernizations that are retrofitted into this old house like air conditioning.
One feature our old house has is coal burning fireplaces that apparently are still in good enough shape to use if we wanted to burn coal. (We don't). The chimneys can be seen from the roof of our house. Three stacks, with large enough holes for critters to sometimes get lost in.
Maybe every 3 or 4 years, we would get a random bat that got lost in our chimney and we would find them hanging out inside the house.
Usually I would open a door or window to the outside, put on a sweatshirt, helmet, mask, gloves, grab a broom, and give the bat a couple of pokes until they wake up, take flight, and find their way out. (I, of course, scream the entire time there's a scared bat freaking out in a small room that I am also locked in)
This usually works and our problem is solved within 10-15 minutes.
Well, it's obvious that climate change is happening. Every summer we're consistently breaking record highs, days over 100 degrees, how many tornados we see, the severity of tornado we see. Talking to our pest control guy, this means that all of those critters we want to keep out or our houses (mice, bats, snakes, bugs) are trying to get into our houses to get some relief. Bats specifically like to find cool airstreams at the end of the night to find a suitable cave. You know, cool airstreams like an air conditioner.
This means, instead of seeing one bat every few years, we're seeing a few bats, every year.
About six weeks ago, our sweet little calico Maestro, caught herself a bat. I was on the phone with my dad, I saw her playing with something on the stairs, I thought it was a sock. I bent over to pet her head and grab my sock only to find out... she straight murdered a bat and was just poking the body.
I snagged the scruff of her neck, tossed her into Sal's office, grabbed a shovel, put the bat into a zip lock bag, and Sal took both kittens and the bat to the vet for a rabies shot.
We sort of thought, great, bat for the year is done. Should be good until at least next year.
Wrong. WRONG. So WRONG.
Sal caught Moxie trying to basically climb our window Monday morning. When she looked up, she saw this guy barely hanging between our curtain and window frame.
Unfortunately, we found this first thing in the morning. We like bats. They eat a ton of mosquitos around us. But I don't like bats inside my house.
Also, most bats are protected animals, so you can't really go around killing them or sending them out during the middle of the day in the heat where a predator will definitely get them.
So for a full work day, we just had to hang out and pretend like there wasn't a bat that a cat could get at any moment or start flying around panicked, creating more chaos.
Situation sounds setup for fun right? You don't even know the half of it.
A few hours after our bat was discovered, our kitchen was delivered. So we now were going to be trying to shoe a bat outside, while dealing with this.
Sal and I spent about an hour re-arranging these boxes to give ourselves a few hallways, but it was still a very crowded room with tons of places to hide.
We spent most the day reading up on bats and how to get rid of them and when you can safely send them out of the house. We found out that most bats wake up and hour or two before they go hunting. They usually like to fly around their cave and sort of wake up until dusk when they go outside and start eating bugs.
We sat down to dinner, cautiously watching the window knowing we had a timebomb on our hand. When was this bat going to start flying around it's temporary cave?
Luckily, he was not an early riser.
As tradition dictates, Sal and I put on all of our gear. We opened the front and back doors and put the cats in the TV room. We closed all other doors, trying to make an environment where the bat could easily echo-locate an exit.
I pulled the curtain down. The bat didn't stir. I was starting to fear that this one was dead as well.
I gave it a couple pokes with the broom. He moved one wing and sort of dug in deeper, but ultimately did not want to wake up.
I poked him a few more times and finally, like Batman, the wings went straight out and the bat defied gravity and went from sleep to full on speed. He did about a dozen circles, I'm on the floor in the kitchen near the back door, Sal is in the middle of the room, trying to track him.
I don't know if you've ever seen a bat fly, but they are hard to track. There's some sort of visual mirage that happens where certain angles they sort of disappear.
We lost him... but I heard a light thump. I didn't think he made it out. So we start patrolling the house and I find him upstairs, laying in the middle of the hallway. I'm not sure if it's dead or stunned, but I know I need something to scoop it up.
I go to the garage, my normal bat scooping shovel is covered in mud from gardening. I find an old flattened box, but am unable to get the bat onto it. I start digging around the basement and find a snow shovel. I think this might be the perfect scooping device... but I never get to test that theory.
As I come through the basement door, Sal screams as if we're under sniper fire. The bat is up and he's freaked out and flying around. He immediately heads toward me and my survival instincts kick in and I hit the ground hard.
We lost track of him. We don't know if he made it out the front or back door and now there's an added variable of the basement door being open.
Sal and I spent the next 90 minutes searching every corner of the basement, main floor, and second floor with flashlights. We can't find him. We feel uneasy, but we decide it's time to give up the search and assume he got out.
We watched some dumb reality TV to sort of calm down again. We were both finally feeling like, "OK, maybe we will be able to sleep" when we heard the absolute worst screeching noise we've ever heard.
That little murderer Maestro had the bat by it's wing and the bat was fighting like hell to get away.
Sal immediately goes into protective mom mode and sort of corrals Maestro toward our open bedroom, the nearest door that goes outside. She screams at Maestro and eventually the bat is released. Sal jumps out of the bedroom with Maestro, both freaked out and breathing hard.
There's an issue. The bat is still in our room. Crash is laying right next to the bat. The ceiling fan is running (not good for bat's sense of flight) and our window unit air conditioner is running (the noise, also not good for the bat's sense of flight.) And even though the balcony door leads outside, it is currently closed.
I put on all my gear again. I sort of cracked the door and I see the bat laying on the ground maybe a foot from Crash. I reach in to grab the cat and the bat jumps up and starts freaking out. I grab Crash by her neck and drag her out and shut the door.
I gather myself. Army crawl into the room and turn off the ceiling fan. I start looking around and finally spot the bat laying on my wrist brace next to our bed. I continue my army crawling to turn off the AC. I crawl over to the balcony door and open it. I make myself as small as possible across the room where I can still see the bat.
I see him twitching. His ears are perked up. I can tell he's sort of mapping the room and seeing if there's danger anywhere. I'm hoping he just flies out, but instead he snuggles as hard as possible to my wrist brace.
After a few minutes when I realize he's not leaving on his own, I army crawl back over to him, pick up my wrist guard. He just hangs out on it as I move him across the room. I set it on the balcony and shut the door. The adventure is over. The bat was gone the next morning.
We sanitized everything in the house with bleach.
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