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Dark visitor in the night.

Soapy Sam

Penultimate Amazing
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Joined
Oct 23, 2002
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Went to bed in the wee small hours. Light out, just dozing off.
Rustle.

Huh?

Rustle, rustle.

Hmm. Crawl back to consciousness and investigate. In the living room is a bookshelf, on which is a plastic bag. Bag is emitting rustling noises. Expecting a large moth, I lift the bag down to the floor.

Inside was a bat!
Tiny little fellow, about 1 1/2 inches long.

I extracted him with no difficulty, but couldn't get him to sit still long enough to have a decent photo taken. He then took to the wing and did several circuits of the flat. (He appears briefly in a video clip I took with the digital camera.)

I then opened a window and he vanished into the night.

It's the second time I've seen one in the building, which is surrounded by trees, but how he got into the flat and into that bag beats me.

Cute little chap.
 
Keep in mind that bats can carry rabies. Having a bat inside your house is not a good idea.
 
Ziggurat said:
Keep in mind that bats can carry rabies. Having a bat inside your house is not a good idea.
Click to expand...

That was my reaction, too.

I like bats. They are SUPER cool animals! But yes, they can carry rabies. Gotta be careful, sometimes.

When I was a kid, we used to watch bats fly around at sunset. It would still be light enough to see them. We would watch one fly by, and throw a small rock up on the air. The bat would pick it up on sonar, and cut a turn towards it before figuring out it was not something it could eat. Much fun, for a kid. :)
 
(From the "We've got bigger ones than you" school:) We have flying foxes as regular inhabitants in our trees here, often hundreds at a time. They are about as big as a large rat, with wingspans to match. They are also known as Fruit Bats, and are NOT considered friendly by the local orchardists.

flying_fox_jbw.jpg
 
One of the old buildings on campus (reputedly haunted) has an internal motion-detector alarm. Thing started going off on a nightly basis.
We were walking the halls and were buzzed by the bat who was responsible! Left a window open and he evidently found his way out.

My wife was watering one of the outdoor hanging plants and accidentally watered another who had taken up residence; it left in a huff, and scared the wife thoroughly.

When I was just a teen, we found one on a tree at about head-level, and scooted it into a cage to look at. It was a female, and had twin babies clinging to her chest! Fascinating creatures.
 
There's been many times I had to cut a night fishing excursion short, because of the bats swooping in to attack my lure as I was casting it. I even nicked them w/ my pole a few times.
 
Ziggurat said:
Keep in mind that bats can carry rabies. Having a bat inside your house is not a good idea.
Click to expand...

Ok, but the following is also worth bearing in mind.

In Europe (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3697490.stm):
“In February, scientists found bats posed only a minor threat of passing rabies on to humans.
A study by the Scottish Executive, Scottish Natural Heritage and Defra found it is rare to contract the killer disease from the mammals.
The report revealed just 2% of one species of bat - the Daubenton - could carry the rabies disease after antibodies were found in its blood.
Deaths from bat rabies are extremely rare and since 1977 there have been three deaths in Europe attributed to EBVL infections, including that of Mr McRae. “

And in the US (http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/1998/housebat/public.htm):
“Rabies is the most important public health hazard associated with bats, but its impact has been vastly exaggerated. The first State to report rabies in a bat was Florida in 1953 (Venters et al. 1954). By 1978, rabies had been reported in 30 of the 40 bat species normally found in the United States and in all 48 contiguous United States, but no increase in the rate of infection has been detected (Constantine 1979b). In 26 years, there have been only eight human fatalities in the United States and Canada attributed to actual bites of rabid bats and two human deaths probably due to nonbite aerosol transmission (Table 1). Tuttle (1979b) noted that "Far more people die every year from dog attacks, bee stings, power mower accidents, or even from being struck by lightning." Unfortunately, newspaper reports and television coverage of bat bites are often sensational, exaggerated and grossly inaccurate, perpetuating misleading information. The Washington Post, 20 September 1979 carried this headline "WARNING: SICK BIRD MAY BE RABID BAT: 12 Million of the Winged Mammals to Pass Through Md. on Way South." On 17 August 1980, the Washington Post headlined a news item "Thousands of Bats, Some Rabid, Infest Hagerstown Homes." Such misleading accounts usually elicit intense public reactions that generate vociferous demands for complete bat destruction (National Academy of Sciences 1973; Mohr 1976). In addition, the following sequence of events usually occurs (D. G. Constantine, personal communication): application of some chemical (DDT or anticoagulant) to kill the bats which results in increased numbers of grounded bats, increasing the probability of human contact and anti-rabies treatment. If a dog or cat is involved, the pet may have to be either quarantined or destroyed (Constantine 1979a).”

However, both articles do nevertheless warn against handling bats.
 
We had fruitbats on Okinawa, I swear they were big enough to carry off a small child. I walked under a tree of them one night, and as they all took flight, I had to run away from a bombardment of guano. I could hear it hitting the sidewalk around me.
 
I remember watching the bats flying overhead from my rooftop in india. Some were so large that no one would beleive that they were actually bats until one obligingly flew dirrectly overhead and you could see the distinctive pattern of their wings.
Cool animals.
 
CurtC said:
Coincidentally, I put up a bat house in my back yard this weekend. Anyone have any experience with these things? Here's an idea of what it looks like: http://lancaster.unl.edu/enviro/pest/factsheets/265-95.htm
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I've put a bat box on the house wall in response to nightly spotting of several bats at dusk, but none has appeared to have taken up residence yet. One of the bats flew in the house one hot summer night through an open bedroom window. Its flight was completely silent, fortunately it flew out through another window.

In the UK all bat species are protected.
 
Don't give up hope on the bat boxes. :)

I just took down my decrepit old shutters a few weeks ago and replaced them with new ones. When I took off the last shutter - a bat popped out and flew directly into the woods, like the proverbial bat out of hell. :D

And this was a shutter on the ground floor under a covered porch, no less...
 
Soapy Sam said:
Went to bed in the wee small hours. Light out, just dozing off.
Rustle.

Huh?

Rustle, rustle.

Hmm. Crawl back to consciousness and investigate. In the living room is a bookshelf, on which is a plastic bag. Bag is emitting rustling noises. Expecting a large moth, I lift the bag down to the floor.

Inside was a bat!
Click to expand...
Exactly the same thing happened to me at about the age of 13. Rustling carrier bag in the bin - "hmmm, that's not just settling, I wonder what that is?"

Maggots. Tons of them, chomping on a sandwich I must've chucked away weeks earlier, then neglected to empty the bin.

Moral of the story: always empty bins in hot weather :)
 
I was expecting a moth, or wasps- (there's a nest of them beggars in the roof, as usual). I've seen fruitbats in Africa. Cute as they are, I can live without one in my kitchen. I liked the way they headbutted seagulls though. You have to be quick to headbutt a seagull.

In Britain we have an enlightened anti-rabies policy: We call in the army and shoot anything even vaguely mammalian for miles.Dogs, squirrels, teenagers. Vandalism goes waaaay down.

As a result, this being an island and all, rabies is pretty rare. Batpooh in the fruitbowl is of more concern. One washed one's mitts thoroughly afterwards. Still cute though!
 
My dad put up a bat box near his house. They say it takes at least a year for bats to find them, and decide to move in.
 
WildCat said:
There's been many times I had to cut a night fishing excursion short, because of the bats swooping in to attack my lure as I was casting it. I even nicked them w/ my pole a few times.
Click to expand...

I've never cut a fishing trip short because of it, but I know what you mean. It can be startling to have bats swoop into your circle of lantern light and graze your fishing ling or pole tip.

I knew a guy when I first started college who said that one night in high school, in a moment of teen anger, he stood on his roof jumping and cursing at God. A bat flew up and got tangled in his hair.
 
Shortly after my father's death several years ago I was staying in his house before it was sold and I succumbed to the irrational scare mentality. I didn't sleep well, and would have lots of lights on and the tv on etc. I never went upstairs because that was where his bedroom was, and it creeped me out. My father was a suicide, and it hit me in very deep and strange ways.

One night, after several ounces of whiskey, I hear "swoosh swoosh swoosh" coming from somewhere else in the house. I turned off the tv and listened, and heard it again.

I looked up the staircase and heard it, but didn't see it.

I went into his bedroom and saw something fly from the walk in closet to the master bathroom. Wondering what the heck it was, I went in the bathroom and turned on the lights, only to see a bat about 7" in wingspan trying to fly around in the shower (It had a glass door, but the door did not go all the way to the ceiling.)

I opened the glass door, and it came straight at me. I slammed the door fast enough to get the poor guy caught by the wing in the door/doorframe.

I went downstairs rather shaken, and after a few more ounces of whiskey decided I had injured it too severely to let back into the wild. I took a broom upstairs and opened the door (after marveling that the little bugger was still flapping around caught in the door) and when he fell, I promptly beat him to death with the broom.

When I woke up the next morning rather hung over, I remembered that I had savagely destroyed a bat while screaming like a crazy man, and to boot, screaming at the bat as though it was my father, as though I was exacting revenge for his suicide.

It was a nasty sight to clean up, especially with a hangover.


Anyway that's my bat story. In the end it turns out the little thing crawled into the attic through a vent, and then slithered through the half inch wide opening left when the hatch to the attic didn't close all the way.


Someday that will make a hysterical scene in a movie...






edited for spelling
 
I love bats. The danger of getting rabbies from bats is overstated in most cases as far as I know.

My wife once studied them, and I helped her sometimes. Spreading mistnets in caves, those are nice memories.

I had a small jar with water and sugar for hummingbirds attached at the window of my bedroom. At night, cute little nectar-eating bats visited the place, quite often entering the bedroom. It was fun, and more than one night we slept while looking at them flying over our heads. Romantic, isn´t it? Have I ever told you I met her inside a cave? OK, we´re weird according to most standards, but we enjoy being like this.:p

One can get rabbies from the vampire bats (Desmodus genus plus another genus whose name I do not remember right now). Since most bats eat insects and fruits, the chances of being contaminated are very small.

edited for spelling
 
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