Have you ever had a bat in your home?

Never had one in the house thank god Mrs squeeky does not like bats.
we did encounter one on a short hike,it kept flying next to Mrs squeekies head for some reason I think it might have liked her perfume,but it did a great job at freaking her out.

Bats are very beneficial for the environment in many ways and don’t need to be killed simply for wandering into and getting trapped in homes.

There are groups you can call who will send out volunteers to find the bats and relocate them for you.

Since I don’t know where you live, this link is for a worldwide group and can most likely connect you to some volunteers in your location.

In the meantime, they also have it’s of helpful info (since you have your tablet with you) :)

www.batworld.org

At the bottom left there’s a link for “locate a rescuer”.

Hope you can find help here. Please don’t let the landlord service just destroy the bat needlessly.

No! Holy shit I would be screaming and streaking too. LOL. OMG.

Yikes yes! I was running around in a panic more terrified than the tiny bat itself was. Luckily it flew out. Even worse was a superstitious neighbor who said it was a bad omen!

When I was very young one evening my family was sitting in the living room. Suddenly we heard a strange noise outside. We went out and saw something flying around the house. On the ground there was a very tiny bat lying, unable to fly (or too yound to fly). My dad picked the little bat up and tried to find its parents. We tried the balcony and saw some bats flying above the house.

While we were about to put the little one down when we heard some loud noise inside the house. We ran downstairs, with my dad still holding on the bat. In the living roon there were two bats flying around. My parents assumed that they were the parents of the small bat and were looking for it. They couldn’t get out because we had closed all the door except for a window in the kitchen. So we opened the door and put the small bat outside. I was assured by my parents that the bats had found their child and they would pick up the child and go home.

I don’t remember having any fear. I only remembered being concerned for the two large bats and happy for the family reunion.

deleted by pachy.

After Adirondackwannabe had to be treated for rabies last year, and a friend started rabies treatment yesterday after being bit by a bat on Wednesday, I would advise anyone to avoid any interaction with a bat.

And a former jelly shared this video of a bat today.

Don’t mess with bats.

^Ouch. That was painful to watch.
Yeah, @adirondackwannabe went through a painful series of shots. I hope he comes on this question and explains it.

Only a cricket one.

Not for some years now but yes. I had a house with an upstairs balcony off the master bedroom here in the Sierra Nevada foot hills and used to have bats fly in at night if I had the door to the balcony open. They were confined to the vaulted ceilings in the bedroom if I could get the bedroom door closed quick enough, depending on the moment of discovery. Otherwise, sometimes they would make it downstairs and it was much harder to get them out, chasing them around with brooms and such trying to “herd” it towards an open door.
The worst was that they would splatter orange bat pee around the ceiling when in their panic.

It was gross and hard to clean.
I love bats, they are very beneficial animals but not in the house.

One night my cat woke me up, scratching my leg. She was under the covers, and my first sleepy thought was, “Oh, that’s cute, she hasn’t done that since she was a kitten.”

Then I heard a squeak,

Yikes, there’s a mouse in my bed!

I jumped up, through back the covers and there was A BAT IN MY BED! The cat had caught it. I put on gloves, grabbed the bat and through it outside where it flew away.

I didn’t want to get back into the bat bed. I fell sleep on the sofa.

I was jolted awake by a crash. My eyes popped open to see my cat on the sofa arm, ready to launch into the air to catch THE BAT FLYING THROUGH MY LIVING ROOM.

She leaped and knocked it out of the air. I slammed a waste basket on top of the bat. I slipped some cardboard underneath as a lid and carried it out and through the bat out again.

I miss that cat. What a hunter, she took a bat out of the air!

Only a middle aged man who dressed up like one.
He insisted on calling me “Robin”.
It was a quite “traumatic” experience.

The apartment building here is home to bats. They live in the roof, as a former neighbor and I once discovered. Sometimes, usually in spring and fall, you can hear them climbing around in the walls. The first time I heard that I was like wtf, it reminded me of the movie Basketcase where in the beginning, the baby is running around in walls before he kills some doctor.

Here are all my batventures.

First bat I saw was in the hallway. It was weird because I was in the kitchen, trying to kill this fly with a fly swatter. Then someone screams in the hallway, so I go over there with my swatter. The neighbor was freaking out, there was a bat spinning around in circles. I wanted to stun it with the fly swatter, and after a few misses I got him, but he died. :( Bats are really fucking fragile. It was just odd that I happened to have the swatter at the time.

This other time, a neighbor knocks on my door and says a bat was in the hallway, and asked me what we’re gonna do about it. It was hiding behind the recycling box. This time I was more careful, I put a plastic bag around my hand and picked it up from behind the box. I picked it up by the wing. I suppose it could have bit me through the plastic, but it just flapped around and I let it loose outside.

And finally, once I go down to the basement to do the laundry and there was a bat down there flying in circles. I was waving my hands at it for it to fuck off, it flew off after freaking out a bit. In the back of the basement. I wnet over there but it was gone, or hidden.

I discovered where they nested with the upstairs neighbor. They all hang around no pun intended inside the space of the roof. We took off a panel and they were there, along with a bunch of bat shit. They also didn’t all fly off like in horror movies. My neighbor was worried, because her son is born with just one lung, and we thought maybe the bat shit could be hazardous to him. We told the landlord, so he installed this disruption thing outside which emits bat like sounds (which human ears cannot pick up) which are supposed to confuse bats, so they eventually all leave. It didn’t work. They’re still here.

@jaytkay

I’m assuming this was a significant length of time past and that your cat is fine. Presumably she had a rabies vac each year?

And yeah, cats are awesome hunters. There are Egyptian wall paintings depicting the cats they trained to hunt for them making some pretty amazing leaps to grab birds out of the air.

@Symbeline

Take a look at that site I linked. They can likely help you with relocating them and techniques to insure they don’t return.

It’s a worldwide organization so you’d likely be able to find a group near you.

These folks are batty about bats (in a good way :)

The landlord would have to handle it, but I’ll certainly show him that organization. Personally I don’t mind the bats, but if their crap can be a hazard, might be a good idea to get them out of here.

That guy in the video was an imbecile! Seriously, ” oooh, come on little bat, climb up my hand.” LOL
The bat was, clearly, unable to fly, either because it was sick, injured, or exhausted. The ones that got in my house would fly around until they were exhausted them cling to the beams on the ceiling. If they get, even a little tear in their wing, which happens a lot if cats get them, they cannot fly at all.

Yes, there are wildlife rescues that rehab bats but you should never attempt to handle anything with your bare hands. Heavy leather welders gloves come in handy for the need to grab a little critter. I was once attacked by a “dead” ground squirrel my cat caught, I was sure it was dead and then, it sprang back to life, jumped on my and while I was flailing around it bit my finger, right on the knuckle, it was SO painful, had to get Tetanus shot but no rabies was recommended. Bats, skunks and raccoons are major rabies hosts, but being nocturnal there is no need to panic if you encounter them at night. Daytime is another matter and can, but not always mean they are sick.,

I never saw the bat and never found any sign of him. I just woke up with these suspicious marks on my finger. I called my doctor and they sent me to the ER, where the doctor took one look and said that’s a bat bite. So I got to start the rabies series. I would not wish that on anyone. The first was 6 shots, 5 immune boosters and one rabies shot. One in each arm and four in the butt. As I’m bent over the table and she’s shooting me in the butt she said you’re a real trooper. I laughed and said you can’t see my face from back there. It hurt. The next day, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. The second round went okay, but the third shot I made it less than 100 yards and I had to find a place to vomit, hard. The fourth one they had me go to the ER. I started to react and they gave me some medicine to counteract the affects. I also lost 15 pound in two weeks. Not fun.

Ugh…makes me think I was pretty goddamn stupid to pick up that bat like I did. Glad it didn’t bite me…

The neighborhood I grew up in used to have plenty of bats that would come out of the surrounding woods at night and feed off of the insects attracted to the light of the street lamps. The parents told us that they were harmless in order to quell our fears of having our blood sucked out in the middle of the night. They explained that they were good for keeping the insect population in check and not to harm them like the neighbor boys who would throw small rocks up in the air to attract the bats’ attention.

One time, the family headed up into northern New York ( @Adirondackwannabe‘s neck of the woods) to stay with some friends in their cabin. We girls slept in the uppermost bedroom. One of the girls awoke to the fluttering of bat’s wings, and we high-tailed it out of there screaming at the top of our lungs. The adults headed up armed with brooms, opened the window and eventually shooed it out.

In college, our Geology class went spelunking in January. In the cave, we discovered a bunch of hibernating bats clinging to the walls. The professor plucked on off in order to allow us a closer look at it. As terrifying and ugly as they are, I have to admit that there is a special beauty about them.

Several years ago, a colony of bats moved into my sister and BIL’s attic. Once discovered, they called a company that removed them, enclosed the opening, and relocated them to another site. Sis bought a bat house that now hangs on the side of their home.

Yes, I’ve seen and heard of others with bats coming inside. Generally they’re just going to want to leave, so yeah you open windows and doors and wait, possibly shooing it a bit. I was once in a house with a bat hanging out (literally) – the owner knew that sometimes happened, and wasn’t too concerned.

Most bats fly around eating insects, and are quite agile and have no interest in bumping into you or your stuff or of biting or scratching you.

The thing that surprised me the most was how big it was – it had quite a long wingspan, much larger than say a fruit bat. Thankfully, we had no contact with each other and I think it was just as frightened as I was.

My ex mother-in-law.