jarrin > My House

After I caught it, I put it in a cage for observation.

Around 2a I'd gone to bed.  I woke up shortly there after because the light in the bathroom had come on.  The bathroom is just outside by bedroom, the door to which I keep open, and has a motion-controlled light (for convenience).  X10 is a flaky system at best, so even though I'd never seen this behaviour from it before, I didn't pay it much mind (besides, I was sleepy). I remotely shut the light off and went right back to sleep.  Or so I thought.

Just a few short minutes later I was roused to the noise of- what? I had an oscillating fan running to help me block out the sounds of the neighborhood, but this was different. It sounded like the fan was malfunctioning. I reached again for the remote light control and turned on the 100w halogen in my bedroom.  Oh no!  Bat Attack!!  A bat was doing laps around my bedroom, flying as best it could in my [relatively] small room.

I'm not one for panic, so as soon as the initial shock of seeing a small animal [they are tiny, though they appear larger when their wings are spread] in my bedroom wore off, I calmed down enough to think of a plan.  I stayed in bed and pulled the sheets up (in case it decided my movement equalled food and wanted to have a nibble of my hair) and watched it do its pathetic circuit.  Since I'd been playing a lot of platform-jumping-Metroid, I was able to use those video games skills to time his flight path against my jumping out of bed and dashing out of the room.

I shut the door and wandered downstairs to figure out what to do about it. Naturally, I consulted the internet. (And wrote a short livejournal post about it, for completeness.)  I decided I would use a large plastic garbage pail to capture it and then... well, I'd figure that part out later.  But by the time I got back into the bedroom, the bat was no longer flying around. I didn't know where it was.

I executed a short, exhaustive search for the little critter, but there were too many places it could have been hiding. While I did shut the door to the bedroom, I had forgotten that there was still a good 3-4 cm gap between it and the floor. Ample room for a bat to stroll under and get into any other room in the house. I was fairly certain it was still upstairs, but nevertheless, I could not unearth it. I decided to pull out my book, turn down most of the lights, and see if it would come swooping back out for another soiree. After half an hour of reading I was tired. I was so tired that I would have happily shared my bedroom with a dozen bats, as long as they didn't keep me up.

Toward morning I keep waking up thinking, "did I hear something?" and, "was that the bat?". Alas, it was not. No bat was to be found. I went to the post office, work, band practice and finally, around 9:30p, got back home. I decided to fire up Metroid again (since the skills I learned from that game were so useful the night before) and wait (and play).

Sure enough! Around 10:30p I saw, out of the corner of my eye, what might have been flicker in the hallway mirror (which reflects my bedroom). I paused the game, ran to the doorway and verified the presence of  Eptesicus fuscus. Not one to abandon such an opporunity, I quickly commandeered the plastic garbage pail from the adjacent bathroom and darted into the bedroom. Mr. Bat was executing his pattern again, so all I had to do was get that big concave thing in front of him and that should have been that. Well, he didn't want to just fly right in. Instead he perched on my black curtains. But it was of no matter! It was still relatively straightforward to get him in the bucket and turn it over on my floor. Success!

I carefully transferred it to a small, clear plastic cage (which used to house my Emperor scorpion, Eugene) for ease of movement. This is where the subsequent pictures came from.

I couldn't just let it go outside: it would have just flown right back into the house. Also, I didn't want murder on my conscience. I decided to put on my coat, boots, and gloves; and drive the little bugger about a mile away to release it along the Minnehaha Creek. It's entirely possible that it has since succumbed to the cold, but I never signed up the coddle the interloper; I only wanted to give it a chance. There are plenty of big, excessively warm houses down there along the creek. Let it find its way into one of their attics.

Thus ends my bat saga. I'm absolutely certain there are no more bats in my walls or in my bedroom.

Absolutely Certain.

 Animal Facts   Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus)

Image Gallery: Bat Attack