apparently, you’re supposed to go in for rabies shots if you just HAVE a bat in your house.

most rabies cases are from people that were bitten by rabid bats in their sleep. they don’t even know!

I was working late (and alone) at the office. It had been raining very heavily and I went out to the balcony to see if it had stopped — and this black shape flapped out of the darkness and landed just above my ear.

I carefully got the bat off and rushed it into the office — it bit me all the way — and popped it into a plastic carrier bag. I admired its attractive doggy face and considered for a while whether I should take it home with me. Nah.

So I released it. I wish I could say I held it in my hand until it decided to leave, but it was more like “I put it on the floor because I didn’t want to get bitten again, and then it flew away”.

I hope it survived the experience. After all, I did.

http://www.lunarworks.ca/pics/bat-jar.jpg

It’s a LONG story, so I’ll cut the many details:

This was its second appearance. (We’d ejected it the day before.) This time I had opened the door to my room, and it flew down the hallway at me, causing me to fall backwards back into my room, shutting the door. There was a long standoff until I left my room again, subdued it with a flying pillow, and it crawled under my door at which point I caught it with a blanket.

It came back the next day. We had a professional come. He took it out of town so it couldn’t find its way back.

(and before you be making cruelty accusations, i every day now save the lives of at least two lizards caught inside where there are no mosquitoes for them to eat.)

Next time you’re throwing animals out the window, wrap ‘em up in that cheesy elephant rug!

I have woken up to find a live bat treading water *in* the loo!

At the rustic summer place where this occurred, bats flying around bedrooms is a not infrequent occurrence, and they are generally dealt with with tennis rackets. Surprisingly, this does not appear to do permanent damage; the bat falls to the ground, but is apparently just stunned. You want to scoop it out the door quickly, as it will be up and flying again shortly.

1. Open door to outside and prop open the screen door.
2. Hold a large sheet up high, stretched out between the two of us.
3. Use sheet as a radar wall and “herd” the bat toward the open door.

Scariest part? Peeking over the sheet to see if the bat was gone, only to have it dive toward me.

“Shields up! Shields UP!!”

I don’t think she’s up to nine yet, but pretty close.

One day, when I was living with my grandfather after graduating college and looking for a job, we decided to get rid of all of them. So we put shirts over our heads, like ninjas and got a trusty vacuum cleaner and started dismantling the bathroom walls. As soon as we removed the wood covering the walls, bats started flying around like crazy. I was below my grandfather, vacuum in hand sucking them up.

How I wish I had a video camera with me that day. Imagine a 70 year old and a 20 year old, dressed up as ninjas (so as to not breathe the guano), my grandfather with a hammer, me with the vacuum, sucking up bats. I guess we could’ve called ourselves the Ninja BatBusters or something.

I love that house… :(

Here’s a ton of bat info, including how to deal with bats in your house – http://www.batworld.org/main/main.html

On this site you can also buy your neighborhood bats a house of their very own, or, if you find yourself intrigued after reading about the wonderful world of bats – sign up for their adopt a bat program.

Also, a few months ago I added additional meshing to the attic vents … and in the process, did a thorough sweep of the attic (not easy, since blown insulation). I did find one dead bat.

PA: Good idea on the sheets. However, if you have high ceilings, that doesn’t work well as they just swoop over the top of ‘em. As noted on the main page, I used window screens as my “SHIELDS UP!” – these have the advantage of being able to see through ‘em

SteveM/Tovi: Good link/story!

BTW, bats are good – they eat bugs. But especially as a father of two kids, I really don’t want ‘em in the house.

I got it out by cordoning it off in a bedroom, opening the window, and letting it fly away.

My cat was VERY interested in the whole process.

This has happened before:
http://colinberry.com/blog/2006/09/23/what-im-a-gonna-do/

CB/Guerneville, CA

People think I’m lying when I tell them I once evicted a bat with a shoe box and a file folder.

Now I have someone else’s substantiation that the technique works!

Do I get bonus points considering that mine was awake and flying around? (Luckily, it landed within arm’s reach at a crucial moment.)

More details at http://datapacrat.livejournal.com/2271.html , if anyone’s curious.

For some reason, we had a bat show up in our house in early August for 3 out of the first 5 years we lived there. We’ve long since moved, but still celebrate Bat Day on August 11!

I suppose it helps that I’ve handled gerbils, hamsters and rats before, and think they’re all adorable. If you’re nervous of them, or aren’t familiar with handling small fragile rodent creatures that want to escape, then the box/newspaper or box/cardboard technique is probably best.

I’m not sure that I recommend tossing them out the second floor window… You could just put them down with the cardboard on top, box underneath, and then poke the cardboard off with a broom (or let the bat knock the cardboard off itself if as you flee inside, if it seems active enough).

And now my cats have taken out two of them. Yes, really. They sleep in an enclosed area in my apartment building, which apparently still had an open access to a pipe (hole in drywall) and they were flying in there.

There is nothing, NOTHING like waking up to find a dead bat lying face down, wings spread, in between you and the loo.

Oh, yes but that’s not all – they also pollenate the agave plant – from which we get Tequila.

When I think of all those lost weekends in Tiquana that wouldn’t have been possible with the bat…….

includes instructions on how to build a bat funnel

here’s the article

remember: bats are our friends!

A few months ago my cat woke me up in the middle of the night by pulling a bat apart *on my chest*. There was blood on the sheets, on me, on the wall, the poor blighter was still sort of flapping and screeching, my cat was amped up some kind of protective bloodlust… not the very worst way I’ve ever woken up, but close. After subduing the bat I pitched what was left of it in the bushes behind my house. When I got to the office some epidemiologists I work with told me to get the bat & go to the hospital right away. The bat was gone, of course, so at the ER I got the full course of shots: ouch times eight. Rabies is just about 100% fatal, so I was happy to err on the side of caution.

I adore bats and yes, they’re still my friends. But I now keep a butterfly net under the bed to avoid future bat-bogey hexing.

When I go running, usually at dusk this time of year, I have bats swooping down near me when I run through the local arboretum. It freaks me out, and the adrenaline rush pushes me to run harder. That’s about the best thing I can say about bats.