I have lived in a number of different places in my life, and each has had its own particular vermin. In chronological order of first appearance, I have had:
- Shrews
- Jumping spiders
- Ants
- Mice
- Cockroaches
- House centipedes (much scarier than the name sounds)
- More ants
However, none of these have freaked me out nearly as much as the invader I had in my current apartment last night:
That is, a bat.
I was tucking myself into bed just after midnight, when something flew frantically up out of the space between my bed and the wall, flapped about a foot or two over my head, and proceeded to ricochet around my apartment like an escaped Quidditch bludger.
I had a screaming fit (as any reasonable person would), then ran into the hallway of my building and slammed the door behind me, with the words “whatdoIdo” looping through my panicked mind.
I decided I needed help, so I timidly rapped on my neighbor’s door (probably dragging him out of bed). He came over, equipped with a basket in which to snare the thing (who says chivalry is dead), but after it took another pass or two overhead, it went and hid, and we couldn’t find it for about an hour. Eventually, we gave up, and yet, not wanting to sleep unshielded in a bat-infested apartment, I again did what any reasonable person would do:
I pitched a dome tent in my living room.
Once I was safely in my dome tent, with most of the lights out again, the bat reemerged, and continued its previous pinball-like trajectory around the mid-to-upper reaches of my living room. I got a good look at it through the screen: little bitty body, but about an eight- to nine-inch wingspan, and very frightened. After a while, it flew into the bathroom, and I took the opportunity to pop out of my tent and open the window, hoping it’d leave on its own.
As it turned out, it did leave on its own — but not through the window. About half an hour later, my neighbor came back over with a little dead bat body: it had crawled through one of the pipe-holes in my bathroom and landed on his bed, with him in it, and he smushed it. I felt kind of sorry for the bat, but at the same time, I was greatly relieved to have it out of my apartment.
I slept in the tent anyway, though.
You get used to bats after awhile. They show up periodically at my parents’ house. My dad has had success swatting them with a raquetball racket that we have sitting around the house for some reason (no one in my family has to my knowledge ever played racquetball), and I have knocked one out of the air by moving a bath towel into its flight path at just the right time. (The hard part is moving down to the floor to cover the bat with the towel before it gets up and starts flying again.)
The general principle of bat catching seems to be to wait until it establishes a regular flight path (they often will go around and around on the same route) and then to use that predictability of its trajectory to catch it.
sounds like an entirely reasonable course of action to me.
you could throw a rock or something, which it might think is a bug and swoop for it, then you swoop with a pot or pan or what-have-you. but you’d have to be fast. i’m not sure what i would do.
texas a&m university libraries have a batman on staff–a man whose specific job it is to come in and catch and release bats whenever they are found in the stacks. In the middle of my undergraduate they were doing some construction on the 5th and 6th floors of the library, and managed to disturb and release into the collection an entire nesting colony of bats. Chaos and hilarity, rabies scares, newspaper articles, and batman signs on the elevators ensued. In the end, they were able to take out most of them and release them, but it once bats pick a nesting place, they want to come back and they have sonar on their side. thus the occasional batman calls.
craziness.
[...] by Not Liz Some of my readers might remember a few years back, when I got into bed and had a bat fly out from behind it (this was in my old basement apartment in Ann [...]