Bats

We’ve had two encounters with bats here in the Benedetti household, and neither encounter has ended well for the bats.

On the first occasion, we had a bat that somehow got into our HVAC room and then managed to get himself stuck on a spider trap (that sticky paper) on the floor. Upon hearing a shrill noise coming from the HVAC room, I opened the door to take a look. Without the benefit of my glasses, I thought an enormous (and vocal) beetle got stuck on the trap. Val instantly recognized it as a bat. The poor little fellow was flat on his back, with the entirety of his wings stuck to the paper. There was no coming back from that, so I had to put him in a trash bag and leave it at that.

The second occasion was this evening, when, as we sat at the kitchen island, a rather large bat circled our heads. Val screamed and immediately ran out of the kitchen, but this cannot be interpreted as panic, as she immediately ran to the double doors between our family room and the rest of the house, closed the doors, and lined the bottom with towels to make it an airtight, bat-proof seal ;-) Meanwhile, I manned the other door with the electric racquet (for mosquitos), to make sure the bat did not get past me into the rest of the house, as Maggie, our dog, who is quite fearless, tracked the bat through the air and at every stop, waiting for her chance to pounce on it.

My first call was to a grade school friend of mine, Joe, to see if he had any advice or knew of someone who specialized in this kind of thing, as I was not too keen on killing the bat, but nor was I too keen on getting bit by it. You might wonder why I would call Joe for something like this, but I would not be able to offer you a logical answer. Let’s just say that if I ever happened upon Bigfoot in my backyard, I would call Joe on that occasion as well. He did, in fact, have a good idea. Get a large bedsheet and walk across the room with it fully extended to capture the bat, after which time we could let it go outside. It was a great idea, for two willing participants, but by this time Val had sealed off the other doorway with a sheet, leaving me alone in the Kitchen / Family Room with the bat.

Thus, with the sheet in hand, extended as far as I could manage, but with the racquet in my dominant hand as a fallback, I endeavored to cast the net. However, before I even took a step, the bat started circling the room, and, as I recounted to Joe, I had to pull a Serena Williams on him. I executed my best approximation of an overhead serve, sending the bat into the wall, after which he lay perfectly still on the floor. Val quickly dumped a few pickles from a large pickle jar into the kitchen sink and provided me with the jar and a cut out piece of cardboard, which I then used to maneuver the bat into the jar and sealed it accordingly. We found a small passage from the fireplace into the family room that we think the bay traversed through, and have temporary sealed it with rags and a 10lb weight.

The biggest lesson learned for me: I might want to take up tennis :-)