I love animals

I love animals. I do. I enjoy seeing wildlife when I go for a neighborhood walk–squirrels, rabbits, ducks, geese, deer. I enjoy visits to the zoo and other animal parks, and especially enjoy the more exotic animals–coati, red pandas, tamarins. I especially like seeing animals, well, in the wild–bears in Canada, alligators in the Everglades, elephants on safari. (From a safe distance, of course.) I love taking pictures of animals too, in all of those situations. What I DON’T enjoy is when uninvited wildlife gets inside my house.

Last year we had not one, but two “bat incidents” in our home. I like bats. I like that they eat insects (up to 600 mosquitoes an hour!). I respect that they sleep during the day. I think it is cool that they use echolocation to fly. One of our family’s favorite bedtime stories was “Stellaluna” by Janell Cannon, about–you guessed it–a bat. But I don’t like having them in my house, and frankly I don’t think they like it either.

The first bat decided to join us indoors last summer, flying in through an open door into the dark basement as my youngest son came in from the backyard at dusk. Tip number one: have the indoor lights on when you open the basement door. Perhaps this bat thought our dark basement was a cave? Confused, he quickly flew upstairs (why?) and proceeded to cause much screaming and scrambling about (one house guest immediately left the house and shut herself in a car, where she remained for the rest of the evening). Tip number two: once a bat is inside, turn on all the lights. The poor little fellow decided that lights meant day, and he was supposed to be asleep. So he flew as high as he could go and latched on to the doorjamb of an upstairs bedroom.

At this point one of my sons thought we should just leave the house and have someone come take care of the bat. We soon discarded this idea as it was 9:00 on Friday night. Various ideas and concerns were bandied about while we stood watching to make sure he didn’t fly away–vacuum cleaner? Broom? Trash can? What if he flies somewhere else? Is he rabid? Will we all need shots? Should we just move out forever? The bat seemed to patiently await our decision, hanging out on the lintel while we debated, sometimes laughing so hard we were doubled over. (It was either laughter or tears, and I’ll always choose the chuckle in those situations.)

Finally we landed on a plan. My tallest son, Spenser (now known as Batman), suited up so every speck of him was covered, including donning leather gloves, a balaclava, and a World War I gas mask (why he has one of those is another story altogether). Tip number three: have a tall person handy. I stood by with a broom as backup, my husband Dean was right behind Spenser with a plastic lidded trashcan, and my youngest son Riordan manned the front door. The plan was that Spenser would, gently but quickly, grab the bat, putting it in the (empty) trash can. Dean would put the lid on and run downstairs, Riordan would open the door, and we would release the bat into the wild. And it worked! The trash can ended up being tossed out the front door with the lid still attached, but when I summoned up the courage to check it later, the bat had survived and escaped. Whew. I needed him to stay around and eat mosquitoes–just not in the house.