A Bat Story

My wife suffers from the inability to sleep much past 3 a.m. So I was amazed recently when I woke up much later and she told me there was a bat in the house and I hadn't been woken by her terrified screaming. She said she had stifled her screams as she swung at it with a broom. She asked me to hunt it down and remove it.

But I've been down this road before and knew that searching for the bat was useless. They are such tiny creatures and can crawl into tiny dark spots and short of completely dismantling the house, I probably wouldn't find it until it presented itself again. I kept my eyes peeled all day but say nary a bat.

That evening my wife was disappointed that I hadn't seen the bat and was fearfully contemplating another early morning encounter. It was at that point, I learned that she had actually hit the bat with the broom during her first encounter, hard enough that it squealed at her. At that point, I figured that it had been injured enough that we would probably never find it until we found mummified remains or smelled it decomposing somewhere.

The following morning, my wife reported no bat encounters which seemed to confirm my injured bat theory. But after returning home after dropping off kids at school, my mother-in-law told me she had found the bat during the night and not only that, caught it! Above is the present she gave me.  I don't know how on earth she caught the thing in that box but I'm guessing the cloth inside it played a part somehow.

I shook the box gently and the bat was still alive so I took it outside and released it on the back patio. At that point, I wasn't sure if it was an injury, the daylight, or the fact that the temperature was just above freezing, but the bat just sort of laid there occasionally moving it's nose. I left it along and a half hour later it was gone so I'm assuming it was just cold and stunned and not injured. So hopefully the bat is now back where ever it likes to hang out during the day and eating its fill of obnoxious mosquitoes and other insects by night.