Off the Top of My Head Online (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} otmh) wrote,@ 2006-08-12 16:41:00 |
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August 15, 2006: Bats - Friend or Foe?
I got a phone call this morning from my mother. This isn't all that unusual. She lives next door and likes nothing better than to call me about an hour before I was planning to get up. I was even expecting her to call today, since I had already agreed to look after our shared dog for the day while she and her husband went off to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary.
As I fumbled for the phone, I dimly remembered it ringing earlier in the morning - maybe half an hour before? - and figured she wanted to give me an earful for not picking up instantly when summoned.
"Hello?" I said.
"Ben? I need your help."
I hate it when she starts a phone call this way, because what she needs my help with is usually something irritating - unloading heavy sacks of garden supplies from the pickup, dragging some object like a park bench from some spot in the yard where it wasn't doing anyone any harm to some other spot in the yard, setting up a circus tent on the back deck, that kind of thing. She's forever picking up these things that she can't set up or move around on her own and then expecting me to do it. Worse, it's almost never anything that couldn't have waited until I was ready to get up on my own.
Today, though, there was a different note in her voice. The words were the same, but they were delivered in a tight-throated tone that I at first mistook for anger, but which was in fact panic.
"What is it? What's the matter?"
"There's a bat flying around in my house."
My not-really-awake brain tried and failed to find some connection between bat presence and waking me up.
"So?" I asked fuzzily.
"So I need you to come get rid of it!"
"What do you expect me to do about it? I have no bat-catching experience. Besides, don't you have a husband?"
"I woke him up and told him to get dressed and he's not doing anything about it. It's in the laundry room!"
"Then open a window and it'll leave. You don't think it wants to be in your laundry room?"
"I'm not going in there! You come open a window."
I sighed. "What kind of bat is it?"
"I don't know! The bat kind."
"Well, how big a bat are we talking about?"
"Big! Maybe... I don't know, the size of a dollar bill?"
"That's not very big. What's that noise? It sounds like wind."
"I'm outside! With the dog! Are you going to come help me or not? I'll pay you."
"Pay the bat, maybe he'll leave."
"That's not funny! You know I hate bats!"
It's true. I do know my mother hates bats. When I was a kid, one found its way into our house through the chimney one summer evening, fluttering (much confused, I would expect) out of the damper flap on the back of the disused woodstove in the living room. Great disruption to our evening routine resulted. Mom and the dog retired to the car while Dad, under maternal edict to come through or else, went to war with the bat. He ended up chasing it upstairs and cornering it in the guest bedroom, where his weapon of choice - a pillow snatched from the guest bed - wreaked havoc on lamps, bookshelves, and the drapes before he finally managed to tag the bat with a corner and stun it long enough to get it into a peanut butter jar. There followed a ceremonial drive into the countryside to release the bat - by now, I'm sure, thoroughly sick of our company - into the wild. It staggered to the lip of the jar, peered around warily (expecting, no doubt, to be whomped by the pillow again at any moment), then fluttered off into the dusk with no apparent ill effects and a great war story to share with the other bats.
Something like that happened two or three times during the years we lived in that house, and the process was always more or less the same. (At least in today's incident, though she went outside, Mom didn't feel it necessary to actually wait in the car.)
For myself, I didn't see bats again until several years later, when a couple found their way into MegaZone's apartment in Worcester. Though I would move into that apartment myself the following year, at the time I was just visiting Worcester for the summer, and Zoner had other roommates (both of whom were pretty much never home). One late afternoon, I was sitting around reading comics or something when a movement caught my eye. I looked up (the apartment's living room had a fairly high ceiling, I think because the building was originally lit by gas - you could see the pipe in the middle of the ceiling where the jet had been) and saw a pair of bats zooming around up there, either having a dogfight or just looking for a way out of the room.
Deciding that I didn't have the tools or skills necessary to handle two bats at once, I opened a couple of windows and decamped to Derek Bacon's apartment for the rest of the afternoon. A few hours later, the telephone rang. Derek picked up, listened for a few seconds, then handed me the phone with a confused look on his face.
Zoner was on the line, laughing hysterically. It took him a few minutes to come out with what he thought was so funny.
"There are bats... in my apartment!" he whooped.
The bats hadn't taken the hint of the open windows, apparently, and they were still flying around when Zoner got home from his summer job making shopping carts at WireFab. As he later related it, he got home, let himself in, dropped his messenger bag on the couch, flipped through the mail, and then found a note from his roommate Bob, who had apparently stopped by for something after I left. The note said something to the effect of, "Nice pets. GET RID OF THEM."
Naturally, Zoner had no idea what the hell that meant. Wondering if Bob had been experimenting with herbal remedies again, he put the note aside and looked up -
- straight into the face of an oncoming bat. Startled, he recoiled and dropped to the floor, then realized as he lay looking up that there were two of them in the room. For some reason - it had apparently been a long day on the shopping cart assembly line - this struck him as very funny indeed. He grabbed the phone and called Derek's place, still flat on his back watching the bats cavort, to share the joke.
One of those bats eventually left, and Zoner thought they'd both gone, but the other had merely gone into hiding somewhere in his room. Bats, it turns out, are awfully good at that. They can roll themselves up into tiny balls and hide almost anywhere, and there were a lot of possible anywheres amid the stuff in Zoner's room. It took a while to locate that one and convince him to leave as well.
Back to the present. Mom was on the phone with a bat in the house, a husband who wasn't being of much use by her standards, and pets barricaded in a safe room while she consulted the resident doer of things requiring physical courage - me.
(You may laugh at the sad state of physical courage around our premises now.)
Seeing that I wasn't going to get her to stop bugging me until I actually went over and did something - God knew what - about the bat, I dragged myself out of bed, consulted the Internet (first hit on a Google search for "how to catch a bat"!), got dressed, and went over to see what could be done. Mom was no longer in the yard. When I opened the front door to her house, she - who was standing just inside having an argument with Vincent about the relative threat level presented by the bat - started violently. I guess she thought the bat might have flown around to the front of the house and opened the door to have a word with her.
"Is it still upstairs?" I asked.
"I don't know, I guess so," she replied. Then she went to the end of the hall, gasped, and ran back. "No! It's in the living room! How could it get into the living room?!"
"They can fly," Vincent pointed out helpfully.
"It's true," I concurred.
"But the door's closed! How could it - no, wait, I thought it was closed, but it isn't." She shivered. "Well? Go deal with it."
I sighed again. "Fine. Get me a towel."
"How big a towel?"
"Big enough to cover a bat."
She started rummaging through a stack of linen, handed me a towel, then snatched it back, muttering, "That's too nice to put on a bat. Take this one."
"This one's too small."
"Then I have to go upstairs. Oh, God, you don't think there could be more than one of them?"
I assured her that that was unlikely, and she went and fetched a decent-size towel. Not that I was too sanguine about the "drop a towel on him" method of bat capture, but it seemed more humane than clobbering about with a pillow or tennis racket.
Thus armed, feeling more like a sommelier than a batcatcher, I went into the living room to see what I could see. Indeed, there was the bat, sitting on the sill of the big picture window, looking forlornly through the glass.
"Is it in there?" Mom demanded from the doorway.
"Uh-huh. He's right here. Aw, he's cute."
"Just get rid of it."
"Keep your shirt on."
I assessed the possibilities. It wasn't a very big room, and the weather was cool with a bit of a breeze. If I opened the back door, which led out into the yard, the bat might notice the fresh air and get the hint. It hadn't worked in Worcester, but what the hell. Better that than getting into some kind of personal confrontation where we might both get hurt. I tried to shut the door leading from the living room into the rest of the house, but there was too much stuff in the way - a computer desk that didn't have anywhere else to roll to because of some piles of yarn, a big iron door stopper. Trying to move it out of the way just made noise and agitated the bat, who started climbing up the curtains and peeping.
"OK, easy, fella," I said, and then went and opened the back door. A breeze blew into the room, rustling the curtain. The bat dropped back to the window sill, then crawled to the edge and looked around. He was cute. I'm no bat expert, but judging from pictures, I'd say he was a little brown bat - tiny pointed ears and all. After a moment, he hopped into the air and made a couple orbits of the room. I stood in front of the doorway, hoping that if I moved around and made noise, he wouldn't try to go that way and end up in the kitchen.
Since making noise was part of the plan anyway, I figured I might as well be encouraging. "Come on, little guy! Wide open door dead ahead! You can do it! Fly! Be free!"
Eventually, after a couple of passes to get his bearings, the bat swooped out the door, flew a wide arc over the pool, and disappeared around the end of the barn (which is probably where he lives). I watched him go, then shut the back door and returned to the kitchen.
"Is it gone?" Mom asked.
"Uh-huh," I said, handing back the unused towel.
"How did it get in?"
I shrugged. "How should I know? Dryer vent? Crack in a window someplace? They don't need much."
There followed some frenzied stapling up of plastic over windows and fretful examination of the dryer vent. I can already see that shaping up as next weekend's big "I need your help with something" job - replacing the dryer vent cover on the second floor of the house, balancing on the front porch roof. What fun!
Afterward, as I stood on Mom's front porch waiting for her to bring out the dog, it started raining. By the time she got outside, the previously sunny sky was pouring with an icy torrent - and I mean that literally; mixed in with the downpour of rain was pea-sized hail. We stood on the porch and watched the hail and rain hammer the tarp-covered pile of firewood in her front yard. It didn't seem fair somehow. I'd handled the bat situation without harm to myself or the bat, the world was safe for democracy and bat phobias again, and now I got to walk home with the dog in a hailstorm.
"It's not an ordinary day," I mused.
Mom laughed. "No," she said. "I guess not."
I got a phone call this morning from my mother. This isn't all that unusual. She lives next door and likes nothing better than to call me about an hour before I was planning to get up. I was even expecting her to call today, since I had already agreed to look after our shared dog for the day while she and her husband went off to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary.
As I fumbled for the phone, I dimly remembered it ringing earlier in the morning - maybe half an hour before? - and figured she wanted to give me an earful for not picking up instantly when summoned.
"Hello?" I said.
"Ben? I need your help."
I hate it when she starts a phone call this way, because what she needs my help with is usually something irritating - unloading heavy sacks of garden supplies from the pickup, dragging some object like a park bench from some spot in the yard where it wasn't doing anyone any harm to some other spot in the yard, setting up a circus tent on the back deck, that kind of thing. She's forever picking up these things that she can't set up or move around on her own and then expecting me to do it. Worse, it's almost never anything that couldn't have waited until I was ready to get up on my own.
Today, though, there was a different note in her voice. The words were the same, but they were delivered in a tight-throated tone that I at first mistook for anger, but which was in fact panic.
"What is it? What's the matter?"
"There's a bat flying around in my house."
My not-really-awake brain tried and failed to find some connection between bat presence and waking me up.
"So?" I asked fuzzily.
"So I need you to come get rid of it!"
"What do you expect me to do about it? I have no bat-catching experience. Besides, don't you have a husband?"
"I woke him up and told him to get dressed and he's not doing anything about it. It's in the laundry room!"
"Then open a window and it'll leave. You don't think it wants to be in your laundry room?"
"I'm not going in there! You come open a window."
I sighed. "What kind of bat is it?"
"I don't know! The bat kind."
"Well, how big a bat are we talking about?"
"Big! Maybe... I don't know, the size of a dollar bill?"
"That's not very big. What's that noise? It sounds like wind."
"I'm outside! With the dog! Are you going to come help me or not? I'll pay you."
"Pay the bat, maybe he'll leave."
"That's not funny! You know I hate bats!"
It's true. I do know my mother hates bats. When I was a kid, one found its way into our house through the chimney one summer evening, fluttering (much confused, I would expect) out of the damper flap on the back of the disused woodstove in the living room. Great disruption to our evening routine resulted. Mom and the dog retired to the car while Dad, under maternal edict to come through or else, went to war with the bat. He ended up chasing it upstairs and cornering it in the guest bedroom, where his weapon of choice - a pillow snatched from the guest bed - wreaked havoc on lamps, bookshelves, and the drapes before he finally managed to tag the bat with a corner and stun it long enough to get it into a peanut butter jar. There followed a ceremonial drive into the countryside to release the bat - by now, I'm sure, thoroughly sick of our company - into the wild. It staggered to the lip of the jar, peered around warily (expecting, no doubt, to be whomped by the pillow again at any moment), then fluttered off into the dusk with no apparent ill effects and a great war story to share with the other bats.
Something like that happened two or three times during the years we lived in that house, and the process was always more or less the same. (At least in today's incident, though she went outside, Mom didn't feel it necessary to actually wait in the car.)
For myself, I didn't see bats again until several years later, when a couple found their way into MegaZone's apartment in Worcester. Though I would move into that apartment myself the following year, at the time I was just visiting Worcester for the summer, and Zoner had other roommates (both of whom were pretty much never home). One late afternoon, I was sitting around reading comics or something when a movement caught my eye. I looked up (the apartment's living room had a fairly high ceiling, I think because the building was originally lit by gas - you could see the pipe in the middle of the ceiling where the jet had been) and saw a pair of bats zooming around up there, either having a dogfight or just looking for a way out of the room.
Deciding that I didn't have the tools or skills necessary to handle two bats at once, I opened a couple of windows and decamped to Derek Bacon's apartment for the rest of the afternoon. A few hours later, the telephone rang. Derek picked up, listened for a few seconds, then handed me the phone with a confused look on his face.
Zoner was on the line, laughing hysterically. It took him a few minutes to come out with what he thought was so funny.
"There are bats... in my apartment!" he whooped.
The bats hadn't taken the hint of the open windows, apparently, and they were still flying around when Zoner got home from his summer job making shopping carts at WireFab. As he later related it, he got home, let himself in, dropped his messenger bag on the couch, flipped through the mail, and then found a note from his roommate Bob, who had apparently stopped by for something after I left. The note said something to the effect of, "Nice pets. GET RID OF THEM."
Naturally, Zoner had no idea what the hell that meant. Wondering if Bob had been experimenting with herbal remedies again, he put the note aside and looked up -
- straight into the face of an oncoming bat. Startled, he recoiled and dropped to the floor, then realized as he lay looking up that there were two of them in the room. For some reason - it had apparently been a long day on the shopping cart assembly line - this struck him as very funny indeed. He grabbed the phone and called Derek's place, still flat on his back watching the bats cavort, to share the joke.
One of those bats eventually left, and Zoner thought they'd both gone, but the other had merely gone into hiding somewhere in his room. Bats, it turns out, are awfully good at that. They can roll themselves up into tiny balls and hide almost anywhere, and there were a lot of possible anywheres amid the stuff in Zoner's room. It took a while to locate that one and convince him to leave as well.
Back to the present. Mom was on the phone with a bat in the house, a husband who wasn't being of much use by her standards, and pets barricaded in a safe room while she consulted the resident doer of things requiring physical courage - me.
(You may laugh at the sad state of physical courage around our premises now.)
Seeing that I wasn't going to get her to stop bugging me until I actually went over and did something - God knew what - about the bat, I dragged myself out of bed, consulted the Internet (first hit on a Google search for "how to catch a bat"!), got dressed, and went over to see what could be done. Mom was no longer in the yard. When I opened the front door to her house, she - who was standing just inside having an argument with Vincent about the relative threat level presented by the bat - started violently. I guess she thought the bat might have flown around to the front of the house and opened the door to have a word with her.
"Is it still upstairs?" I asked.
"I don't know, I guess so," she replied. Then she went to the end of the hall, gasped, and ran back. "No! It's in the living room! How could it get into the living room?!"
"They can fly," Vincent pointed out helpfully.
"It's true," I concurred.
"But the door's closed! How could it - no, wait, I thought it was closed, but it isn't." She shivered. "Well? Go deal with it."
I sighed again. "Fine. Get me a towel."
"How big a towel?"
"Big enough to cover a bat."
She started rummaging through a stack of linen, handed me a towel, then snatched it back, muttering, "That's too nice to put on a bat. Take this one."
"This one's too small."
"Then I have to go upstairs. Oh, God, you don't think there could be more than one of them?"
I assured her that that was unlikely, and she went and fetched a decent-size towel. Not that I was too sanguine about the "drop a towel on him" method of bat capture, but it seemed more humane than clobbering about with a pillow or tennis racket.
Thus armed, feeling more like a sommelier than a batcatcher, I went into the living room to see what I could see. Indeed, there was the bat, sitting on the sill of the big picture window, looking forlornly through the glass.
"Is it in there?" Mom demanded from the doorway.
"Uh-huh. He's right here. Aw, he's cute."
"Just get rid of it."
"Keep your shirt on."
I assessed the possibilities. It wasn't a very big room, and the weather was cool with a bit of a breeze. If I opened the back door, which led out into the yard, the bat might notice the fresh air and get the hint. It hadn't worked in Worcester, but what the hell. Better that than getting into some kind of personal confrontation where we might both get hurt. I tried to shut the door leading from the living room into the rest of the house, but there was too much stuff in the way - a computer desk that didn't have anywhere else to roll to because of some piles of yarn, a big iron door stopper. Trying to move it out of the way just made noise and agitated the bat, who started climbing up the curtains and peeping.
"OK, easy, fella," I said, and then went and opened the back door. A breeze blew into the room, rustling the curtain. The bat dropped back to the window sill, then crawled to the edge and looked around. He was cute. I'm no bat expert, but judging from pictures, I'd say he was a little brown bat - tiny pointed ears and all. After a moment, he hopped into the air and made a couple orbits of the room. I stood in front of the doorway, hoping that if I moved around and made noise, he wouldn't try to go that way and end up in the kitchen.
Since making noise was part of the plan anyway, I figured I might as well be encouraging. "Come on, little guy! Wide open door dead ahead! You can do it! Fly! Be free!"
Eventually, after a couple of passes to get his bearings, the bat swooped out the door, flew a wide arc over the pool, and disappeared around the end of the barn (which is probably where he lives). I watched him go, then shut the back door and returned to the kitchen.
"Is it gone?" Mom asked.
"Uh-huh," I said, handing back the unused towel.
"How did it get in?"
I shrugged. "How should I know? Dryer vent? Crack in a window someplace? They don't need much."
There followed some frenzied stapling up of plastic over windows and fretful examination of the dryer vent. I can already see that shaping up as next weekend's big "I need your help with something" job - replacing the dryer vent cover on the second floor of the house, balancing on the front porch roof. What fun!
Afterward, as I stood on Mom's front porch waiting for her to bring out the dog, it started raining. By the time she got outside, the previously sunny sky was pouring with an icy torrent - and I mean that literally; mixed in with the downpour of rain was pea-sized hail. We stood on the porch and watched the hail and rain hammer the tarp-covered pile of firewood in her front yard. It didn't seem fair somehow. I'd handled the bat situation without harm to myself or the bat, the world was safe for democracy and bat phobias again, and now I got to walk home with the dog in a hailstorm.
"It's not an ordinary day," I mused.
Mom laughed. "No," she said. "I guess not."
