Bats in the House!

Here’s another example of “welcome to life on our farm”… tonight, I’m sitting on my bed folding laundry and chatting with my husband when, out of the corner of my eye, I spot something flying just outside our bedroom door.  I jump when I realize it’s a bat!  In our house!  I explain what I saw and my husband looks dubious and makes a crack about maybe I’m going batty.  

I’m starting to think maybe I am batty when suddenly there it is– a real bat– flying circles in our living room, then into the playroom… the kitchen… darn open floor plan.  We fling the sliding glass doors open and remove screens from windows, attempting to chase him out, but the circling continues.  At one point he lands on our brick fireplace.  My husband lifts a screen towards him and I shout, “don’t hurt the poor little guy, he’s probably scared and confused!”

About half an hour of circling, landing, and circling some more, both my husband and I are fed up.  The bat seems to have gone out the window and come right back in.   Maybe there are some good bugs in our house?  But it’s late and we want to sleep, so the batty feast needs to end.  But then, out of nowhere (or maybe the open door?) there are TWO bats!  They are so fast we can hardly see them, there’s no hope of catching them, and we aren’t sure what to do.  But then… they… are… gone… or, at least, we think (hope!) so.

During the fiasco my husband pulls up google to see how to get bats out of the house– in our case it seems like you just have to wait for another bat to come get our little bat friend.  But more research reveals bats in the house typically means bats in the attic.  Since we just had the roof replaced this seems unlikely, but hubby is going to check it out tomorrow.  In the meantime, we’ve learned if you encounter a bat in your house, try to enclose it in a room that leads outside, leave on the lights, open the windows and doors to outside, and stand back.  Don’t try to chase or capture it.  The bat will circle until it finds it’s own way out.  Or a friend comes to take him home.  Good to know.
P.S. the snerds slept through the entire ordeal, including my screaming when the bat flew inches from my head!