"Oh God, I'm so goth, I've got bats in my boots."
--My eldest daughter, the mad seamstress
As MizBubs watched TV the other night, one of the compound mutts (Duffy) went goofy and started sniffing, barking and running around a pair of our daughter's shoes on the living room floor. This went on for a few moments, and then Duffy assumed the alert watchdog position and stared at the shoes.
A few minutes later, MizBubs noticed some movement near the shoes. A mouse? A dog toy that Duffy dragged from under the sofa? Nope.
A bat. A live bat, subsequently identified as Myotis lucifugus, a Little Brown Bat. Injured, which is a good thing because it kept him from flying around the house, bumping into things, tangling in everyone's hair while biting them and giving everyone rabies. Instead, he crawled along on the floor while Duffy went apeshit.
MizBubs, girl dynamo, called in our youngest daughter to witness the unbelievable cuteness of the little bat. They agreed he was adorable, but not to be touched since he was, after all, injured wildlife. No Steve Irwins here. Miz Bubs then put on some cement-mixing gloves, got a shovel, scooped up the little rabies carrier, and flung him into the neighbor's yard, out of the reach of our dogs. She then returned to her regularly scheduled broadcast.
How did a bat get into my house? We couldn't see any obvious way in, so right now I'm going with the theory that one of the dogs brought him in, and unsure of what to do with him and inexperienced in bat-killing, lost control of the bat. It's a weak theory, though, and I'm open to other suggestions.
6 comments:
I came home one day to a bird in my house. I recalled later having left my door ajar in the morning after I went back in to get something before heading out again. Must have hopped on in then. Scared the crap out of me.
I had a bird fly into my classroom last year, but never a bat. Knock on wood.
I used to live in a Victorian house in St. Paul...It had three chimneys with no flues (or whatever you call those things you can shut.) In one day in August, I had a bat in my store (and it couldn't leave because the sensor security system messed with it's radar,) and then TWO in the house when I got home half in the bag from the cocktails it took to calm me down after the bat at work incident.
Bats suck.
Bat overload!
That's the first I've ever heard of jamming bat radar. Amazing. It's not so much that bats are scary, it's the thing of suddenly having a living thing buzzing around where you weren't expecting to see one.
See, here's the irony--MizBubs loves bats, even has some tattooed on her back. She helped the bat. She viewed it, rightfully I think, as one of God's beautiful furry wonders.
If it'd been me, after I got done with the instinctive revulsion, I probly would've beat it to death. And I know that's wrong, because bats are our friends. They're like, our first line of defense against West Nile Virus.
Yeah, well when you get SEVERAL EVERY FREAKING YEAR
Killing them seems like a really great idea.
It's a lot of work to get a not injured bat out of the house.
Of course now Django just kills them for me. GOOD PUPPY.
How does he do that? I mean, I assume he only gets the low-flying ones, or the sluggards that stay on the ground. Unless you've built some kind of bat-killing trapeze harness for him and he bungees around your house plucking bats out of the air.
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