Bats - Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

Maybe they were mates and one had called to the other. Anyway, I stepped back inside, closed the doors, and stood for some time observing their behavior and wondering what to do about it. When they left the room and headed upstairs I raced after them. After securing the doors of the rooms where Tesi and Amadi were sleeping, I went into Asa's room and found him and his friend watching just one bat flying in circles. The three of us sat there for a while, admiring the bat, trading animal stories, and discussing possible strategies. At one point the bat did come to rest on the woodwork of a window frame. (It's quite striking how small they get when the wings are folded up--suddenly more like a mouse than a bird.) I made one attempt at capture it as it hung there, using a modification of the box method (#1), but the attempt failed because the thing was not sound asleep and saw me coming. Eventually Asa's friend's mother showed up and asked us why we didn't just open a window. I had a ready answer for that, of course, but in the end we gave it a try; and in fact it wasn't long before the bat found its way out. We never did know what happened to the other one, but it stands to reason that whatever secret route they have for getting into the house would also serve for getting out.

Asa's Bat: Sometimes Method #4 works just fine: you open a door and it has the desired effect of making the inside and outside bat population densities as nearly equal as possible. Asa once found a ground-floor lap-flying bat when the rest of the family had retired for the night, and when he opened a sliding door (staying low to the ground and looking anxiously over his shoulder, he says) it worked like a charm.

To return to the other night: When I had finished reminding Tesi and myself that I was not so very much afraid of bats, I stuck my head into the room and verified that indeed there was a bat flying in circles. I stepped inside, crouching a bit, and closed the door behind me. My plan was to open that other door leading to the balcony, already mentioned in the Broomstick episode. Nika was in the room, and I was surprised that she wasn't paying more attention to the bat. My first step was to simplify my life by getting her out of there; not only did I not relish playing Josh to her Magick, but I didn't want to have to think about her sneaking out on the balcony or getting underfoot. I caught her without difficulty and put her out in the hall, then opened the outside door and sat down in a corner to watch. The bat continued circling. My inner monologue went something like this:

"It keeps almost finding the way out. One of these times ... Hey, watch where you're going, buddy! ... Of course, I know it would never blunder into me--it has echolocation, right? ... Wow, that time it almost it found the door ... People always think a bat's gonna get tangled in your hair; that's a myth ... You can hear their wings, can't you? Not like owls, with those special stealth feathers ... Hey, you're nowhere near the Jesus, watch where you're going! ... Just remember, Tom, that little thing is much more afraid of you than you are of it ... Bats aren't even blind, either; that's another myth ... No way would it bump into me ... "

I got cautiously to my feet and opened the other half of the double doors, then returned to my corner.
"Oh, man, you were halfway out the door that time, what's the matter with you?! ... All right, I can wait. Just have to wait. Just a matter of time ... Not here, you fool, the door's over there! ... Oh, unbelievable, here comes another one."

Yes, now there were two bats circling. There didn't seem to be much to do except watch and wait. I was losing patience, talking out loud, whining, pleading. The most excruciating moment was when one of them went out and then came right back in. But eventually, one at a time, they found their way out.

The end.

Bats - Part 1

The other night Tesi called to me from the top of the stairs, quietly so as not to wake Amadi. "There's a bat in our room." I went to the stairs. "Did you say a bat?" "Yes, a bat." "OK, I'm coming." "I don't do well with bats," she said a little plaintively.* I remarked that I do well with them in the sense of being brave but not always in the sense of being effective. "Is it flying or sleeping?" "It's flying." "Well then I guess I'll just have to open some doors or windows and hope it goes better than that other time."

In fact there have been several other times. Here are some of the visiting bats that I remember best:
The Show and Tell Bat: This was about fifteen years ago, in a different house. I found it one morning asleep on the wall of a ground-floor room, clinging somehow to an apparently sheer vertical surface. Method #1: I got an open cardboard box, pressed it against the wall to enclose the bat, slid the box gently down to nudge the poor thing off the wall, and quickly popped a cover on before it could gather its wits and fly away. It was a cover that you could see through--a square of window screen material. Moved by an urge to share it with more than the immediate family, I decided to carry it down the street to Asa's preschool and show it to all the kids there. The teacher did not seem pleased with this highly educational idea of mine, but I assured her that I would keep the lid on. One interesting surprise: on the way to school the bat began loudly yelling at me. This was not echolocation; the sounds were well within the range of human hearing. I suppose it was expressing annoyance about the confinement or the bumpy ride, or both.

Last week, in a waiting room, I made the acquaintance of one of those children who love facts. He was asking Amadi "Do you know how many insects a bat can catch in an hour?" She made no effort to hold up her end of the conversation, so I cheerfully took up the slack. "I don't know. It must be a lot." "It's between 100 and 1000." "Wow, that is a lot!" I said. "Guess how many!" he pressed. "Oh, I thought we were done. It's a specific number?" "It's 6oo." He then moved on to "Do you know what animal can jump the highest?" Several of us started guessing: a kangaroo? some kind of bug? We were getting nowhere. He clarified that he meant jumping straight up in the air, and then he gave us a big hint: it's a kind of cat. More wrong guesses: leopard? snow leopard? We gave up. He said it was a tie between two African cats: the cerval and the caracol. I forget how high he said--something like fifteen feet, maybe. I asked why they jump in the air. He said it was to catch birds--guinea fowl. I told him that I'm sure our cat Nika would love to be able to jump that high, especially when a bat gets in the house.

The Wastebasket Bat: This was in our current house, maybe five years ago. I was alone on the ground floor of the house, working. Out of the corner of my eye I was getting glimpses of something moving in a darker room nearby, but it didn't really get my attention until I noticed that it had Nika's attention. We watched it travel the length of the house a number of times, Nika making the occasional spring at it as it went by, but neither of us had any really constructive ideas. After a while the bat flew upstairs and started doing more laps up there. Method #2: I managed to close a key door at the right moment, thus isolating the problem, and went to bed. In the morning I cautiously entered the room, closed the door behind me, and searched until I found the sleeping bat. It was in a wastebasket rather than on a wall, so I just moved it to the back garden, telling it that I was in no hurry for the wastebasket and it could sleep as long as it liked.

A cat that I used to know caught a bat once. Her name was Magick, and she had a haughty and regal bearing, and she belonged (although she would never have put it that way) to my ex-wife, before I did. The incident occurred before the beginning of our acquaintance, so I have the story second- or third-hand. When a bat showed up one day in the big house where Magick was living with several humans, she caught it (Method: Unknown). No doubt she would have loved to show it to Karen, but she couldn't find Karen, so she took it to Josh. Josh was not someone who did well with cats, let alone bats. Finding him sitting on the floor of his room surrounded by household papers, she proudly laid her prize, bleeding and still flapping feebly, right on top of his Accounts Payable. I believe that he screamed--again well within the audible frequency range.

The Broomstick Bat: This one was found sleeping directly above our bed one morning, holding on to a sort of high rafter. So the bat was not pre-packed for transport this time, nor would it be easy to adapt the box trick without a big flat surface behind the bat. Also it was going to be too high for me to reach unless I did something crazy like putting a stepladder on the bed. Method #3: I decided to prod it with a stick and see if it might be persuaded to hold on to the other end. The bare end of a broomstick only caused it to shuffle sideways in its sleep, so I tried the other end. When poked with broomstraws the bat became seriously annoyed. It turned its beady eyes on me. Horrible chittering imprecations issued from a tiny open mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. After a brief retreat to calm my nerves, I returned to the task. The bat was still angry, but this time it grasped the straws and let go of the rafter. Moving slowly, I opened the door to the balcony and stepped out, holding the bat before me on the broom like a pizza on a wooden paddle. I gave it a little shake, thinking it would fly away; it fell like a stone to the paved surface below, never even unfolding its wings. Sick with the thought of tiny broken bones, I hurried through the house and out to the driveway. Apparently it was uninjured: it took hold of a twig that I offered it and then consented to transfer itself to a nearby sapling in a quiet out-of-the way spot, where it hung itself up and went back to sleep.

That Other Time: This was a couple of years ago, I think. It began, like the Wastebasket story, with a bat flying laps on the ground floor. Remembering a previous success, I tried closing doors to reduce the range of flight, but there was no way to seal off the area. The bat flew great loops in the big front room while I watched. It occurred to me that if I were to (Method #4) open the French doors it would be bound to find its way out sooner or later. Of course, a few bugs might fly in in the meantime, but that's a small price to pay, right? Or--here's a funny thought--more bats might fly in. Yeah, that would be funny. I crossed the room, ducking and flinching as appropriate. I think I may have even crawled on elbows and knees, like a soldier moving from trench to trench in an old war movie. I opened the doors. I stepped outside under the wistaria/wisteria arbor and stood waiting and watching. A minute later, sure enough, a second bat flew right past me and started circling the room with the first one.

(to be continued)

* I would like to point out that this is the same brave woman who once wrapped an osprey in a towel to help it get out of a screen porch, a thing I could not have imagined doing myself.

Silly creatures

At no small risk to himself* a "senior rescue technician" of the Animal Rescue League rescued a Canada goose from the icy surface of a pond. The bird had been frozen in place for days. Oh, at the time of rescue the weather had changed and the bird was not frozen in place; its problem was that it couldn't fly because that would have meant first having to stand up on slippery ice.

*he wore an emersion suit [sic], in case the ice broke

Nika

Our cat finds bags entertaining. We find her entertaining.

Pet mice

We kept them for a few weeks. We gave them food and water and a cardboard tube to hide in. There was an exercise wheel in the cage, which one of the three made good use of. As I recall, another climbed the walls a lot and the third mostly cowered in the tube. 

Based on the theory that mice need to be able to sleep in the daytime, plus the fact that one of them seemed to be terrified of us, we draped a kitchen towel over the cage to give some privacy. They appreciated this gesture very much, but not in the way that it was intended. They were able to grab the towel through the bars and rip off little bits of it, and they kept this up until they had plenteous masses of red and white nesting material in the cardboard tube and elsewhere. So much for covering the cage, though -- in effect, the curtain rose steadily as the days passed.

Eventually a thaw came and we judged that they would be happier outdoors; my daughter and I took them to the usual place and said good-bye.

Keeping mice warm

From time to time we get mice in the house. If the sight of their droppings bothers us enough, we set traps. Not those cruel spring-loaded things, of course: these are plastic boxes with little doors. You put cheese or something in there at the far end and set it down carefully with the door open. Then (1) mouse smells bait, (2) mouse walks into box, (3) box tips slightly with added weight, (4) door swings shut. All you have to do then is pick it up and take it outside and let the thing go. Well, maybe you don't want to just take it out to the yard -- it would probably come right back in. Well, maybe you don't want to just put it next to the neighbors' house, either: not fair to make the mouse move into their house instead. So you take it to a little patch of woods at the end of the street. Your child might be a little troubled by the thought that the mousie is so far away that it might never see its family again. You might even be a little troubled by the same thought, but you stifle it.

The first time I ever did this, I had an embarrassing false alarm: got all the way to the patch of woods before I figured out that there was nothing in the box. It had been sprung somehow without catching anybody, and I had jumped to a conclusion. Well, I didn't want to open it before I got there! It could have jumped out!

One time we caught a mouse in winter. The way the snow was falling that night, we couldn't see turning it out of the house: it must be so hard digging yourself a burrow when the ground is frozen and you're shivering. We improvised a temporary cage and reset the trap. A few hours later we had three of them in captivity and the weather was not letting up. So we borrowed a proper cage from some neighbors who no longer had gerbils or hamsters, put our three temporary pets in it and waited for a thaw.

Part 4: Peppermint oil

It turned out that I had not been quite careful enough not to imprison anybody. Desperate scrabbling sounds were heard. Back up the stepladder. Off with the panel, ducking my head.

It would have been nice if, as soon as I opened up again, the desperate scrabbling had turned into a desperate bid for freedom; even clawmarks on my scalp would have been a small price to pay, I think, for knowing we were done. But no action. I could see a squirrel cowering in what I called the "back room". Or rather I could see part of it. It was behind a sort of roof rafter and I don't think it knew that its tail was showing.

Common sense said that it was more likely to come out and let me finish if it was not being watched. On the other hand, I had to keep an eye on things if I wanted to avoid closing up prematurely again. I kept my distance and tried to be watchful but non-threatening.

At one point, losing patience, I got back up there and reached in with a stick to tickle the tail, thinking maybe I could scare it into fleeing. Of course this just caused it to pull the tail up and out of sight, making it even harder to keep an eye on things.

We began to consider ways of driving it out. My wife remembered a little vial of peppermint oil that a neighbor had given us once as a mouse repellent. A rodent is a rodent, right? I impregnated a fairly large number of paper towels with the stuff, put them in the squirrel house, and waited some more. No action. I put the panel back in place to keep the fumes from dissipating. At this point you could smell peppermint in the second-floor bathroom. Now what?

Part 3: Insulation

We weren't sure how to proceed. My wife's idea seemed to be that someone would have to get up on a ladder with some sort of power saw and cut his way in, wearing protective headgear -- maybe a bicycle helmet -- to protect himself from toenails when panicked squirrels came racing out. (She is by nature a worrier, and a planner for worst cases, although you might not guess that from the osprey story.) I was imagining something a little different, a hammer instead of a saw, prying things apart with the claw, but it was still going to be violence to the house and it was not very clear in my mind. We were both daunted. In the end she asked for help from a friend (a different one) who also knows something about houses. He took one look and pointed out the right way to get in there. There were several clearly visible screw heads; undo them and the front panel would come right off. Duh.

This friend then got up on a stepladder, took the panel off, pulled out armfuls of vegetable matter that the squirrels had been using for insulation -- he filled a fairly large trash barrel -- and closed it up again. He was pretty sure there were no squirrels in there. He nailed a piece of scrap wood into place to close up the chink between panel and stucco that they had been using to get in and out. We thanked him and he went away.

Within an hour or so, squirrels had chewed through that thin piece of wood and were busily reinsulating, repeatedly running in with mouthfuls of leaves and pine needles and out again to get more. I admired their industry, but it made me tired to think of all the wasted effort on their part and ours.

Then it was my turn to get up on the ladder. I took off the panel and pulled out all the leaves that I could reach. I was actually a bit more thorough about that than the other guy had been. This was in effect a two-room squirrel house, with the further "room" being hard to reach and hard to see into, but I did my best. And somewhere back there I found a piece of wood which was clearly the bit had originally filled that chink, which settled the question of what I would use to close up. It was sturdier and a perfect fit and it just needed some screws or nails.

I was as careful as I could be about not leaving the site unattended during this operation, so that again I could be reasonably sure that when I did close it up I was not imprisoning anybody.

Part 2: Stains on the stucco

Over the next, oh, I don't know how many months, it became harder and harder to ignore the fact that one or more squirrels were living in that enclosed space. (I was sorry to think that we might not have given them enough time to get their babies to safety up there, if that was the case, but it had been hard to just leave the helpless things on the ground given the danger of a cat or a dog coming around.) A bit of broken woodwork afforded a visible opening to it, and from time to time we would hear them running up and down the stucco wall that led to it from the ground. Sometimes they even used the first-floor half-bathroom window in that wall to get a toehold as they raced up, so that a peaceful sit could be interrupted by a very surprising clattering.

What finally moved us to action was two things: One, some strongly colored brownish liquid was making its way down that nice cream-colored wall in greater and greater quantities; presumably rain was getting into the top of that inhabited space and dripping out the side or bottom after becoming infused with -- what? pee and poop? pee and poop and something from the nesting material? Two, a trusted advisor of ours, a friend who is in the construction business (and has in fact done some major work on this house) told us that we were asking for big trouble. He pointed out that if the squirrels were to find their way into the walls of the house and from there to, for example, the attic, and to start chewing on things electrical, then we could find the house burning down some day. But we forgot to ask him how to get in there.

The other squirrel story, Part 1: Saving the babies

One day two baby squirrels appeared at our doorstep. They were too young to run or climb to safety. One of them was a more competent crawler than the other, but they both looked like goners. It seemed that they had fallen from a nest. We didn't see a nest, although we had a hunch that there was one in an enclosed part of the house right above the door -- unconnected with the inside, a sort of leftover space under an added-on rooflet. We didn't detect any parent squirrels trying to deal with the situation, so after some hours of this my wife collected the poor things in a box and dealt with it herself. She somehow managed to locate someone not too many miles away who has built an excellent rehab center and rest home in his back yard for injured and orphaned squirrels and was happy to take on two more cases.

Catch and release

One day we arrived at that same little country house to find something big flying around in the screened porch -- a fully grown osprey. It had entered through one of the window screens, probably blundering into the screen headfirst and suddenly finding itself more indoors than outdoors. The poor worried thing would cling to a screen with its mighty talons, flap its mighty wings a couple of times to cross the room to another window, and repeat, sometimes resting, never for long, hoping for a way out.

We could have just opened the exterior door, gone away, and waited. Instead, my wife took matters in hand, drawing on skills acquired in childhood when she used to assist a charming old gentleman in banding (much smaller) birds. She slowly approached the osprey, holding a large outstretched towel before her in a soothing manner. Then she deftly wrapped the bird up from behind and held it firmly but gently as she carried it outdoors, where she opened the towel and let it fly away.

In hindsight we both thought she had taken a crazy chance and was lucky not have been seriously cut up by claws or beak at the moment of release.

Saving a Squirrel

In our family's country house is a wood-burning stove. Opening it once after some months' absence, I found the corpses of two grey squirrels inside. We assumed that they had entered by the chimney, been unable to get out the same way, and starved to death. As we removed the dead squirrels we became aware that there was also a live one lurking in the flue. To save it from the same fate, we baited a Have-A-Heart trap on the hearth, opened the stove door, sealed off the immediate area with heavy plastic sheeting, and left the house.

The damn squirrel came out when all was quiet, ignored the yummy peanut butter in the trap, tore through the plastic, ran all around the house knocking breakable things off shelves, ate up all the toothpaste it could find, and generally made itself at home. When a human entered the house to check the trap (ha!), the thing exploded out of the kitchen garbage pail and raced back into the stove.

Later, when somebody with a little more sense tried annoying the animal with some smoke, it just ran away up the chimney and never came back. We never knew how the other two died.

humidity, vermin, etc.

Make yourselves at home. My door is always unlocked, but it does seem to stick sometimes. I will try to solve the problem. It may just be the humidity.

It seems that by the time people had managed to push their way into the previous post all the nice fruit and cheese that I had left out had been devoured by vermin. Help yourselves to anything you find, but I would be cautious in approaching anything in the back corners of the fridge.

I will be back this evening, ready to attempt a nonempty post. Right now I have some work to do in the real world.