Bat Adventures: Unwelcome Guests

What's Lurking in the Attic?It’s time for our house guests to go.

Not the relatives who are down for a visit, but the bats that have moved into our home. Last week was the final straw – we found evidence of them in the actual living area for the very first time. Previously, they had respected our space and kept their mess and activity confined to the attic area.

We first discovered the bats a couple years after we moved in. We could hear the scratching in the ceilings and walls and decided it was time to investigate. The droppings in the attic gave us a sense of the size of the animals and where they were. At that point we thought it was mice, or maybe squirrels, so we set out traps of various sizes to see what would happen.

Bottom line … nothing happened, we didn’t catch a thing.

Shortly thereafter I was crawling around above our home office and heard a crunch. Uh oh. Thankfully it came from between two boards I was moving around to span the rafters rather than under my knee. Dead mouse? Nope, dead winged mouse – a bat. That’s how we first figured out what was up there.

In a way, learning it was a bat was a relief. We were worried it was a squirrel or something else that was more destructive. Bats seemed less concerning, though still potentially a problem. We eventually gave up trying to get rid of them and reluctantly accepted them as “tenants.”

But last week’s activity changes the dynamic of our informal contract. We called in the experts for a consult … more on that in the next installment.

5 thoughts on “Bat Adventures: Unwelcome Guests

  1. My Dad crawled head on into a bat in his House in Simsbury… the thing began to spread its wings as it hung upside down, and he crawled backwards as fast as he ever has in his life!!!

  2. There are ways to proof the home that allow for the bats that may have taken up residence to be cleared without killing them. Basically – if you can find where they are getting in, plug it at night – but hopefully whomever you hired will offer something of that nature. We need bats – not in the house of course.

  3. Wow, Brooks, that sounds like quite an intimidating bat your father encountered!

    And, Michael, you’re right – we need the bats, and the appropriate way to get them out of the house is not killing them.

    Our appreciation of their bug-eating abilities were one of the reasons we let them hang out up there for so long. Hopefully they’ll find a nice new home close by so they can continue to hunt in our yard. Any neighbors looking for pets?

  4. Who says there’s a bat shortage? We had one in our bedroom last week. I think we got it out alive…

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