Animal Kingdom

So the bats are back (as you may have read in one of the comments from my roommate below). I was jet-lagged Saturday evening when I got back to the states, so a bat could have been on my forehead through the night and I wouldn’t have cared. But now I’ve just spent the last two nights away from home because I realized I’m living in animal kingdom.

After observing the bats flying from my chimney at sundown, I proceeded to go sit out on my back porch. This is when I came face to face with one of the largest wood roaches I’ve ever seen. Now they aren’t unfamiliar to the area around my house…but usually they scamper off at the first sign of me. Not this one…he proceeded to make a straight line in our direction. We cut our losses and decided to go outside via the garage at the back of my house.

We walked around a bit outside to see if we could get some different angles of the bats. We couldn’t. So we walked back toward the garage to go back in. Right about the time we were approaching our garage door…my peripheral vision caught side of the largest wing-span I’ve ever seen (ever seen that close to my person, that is). It was coming from around the corner of my house. I shot off in the opposite direction, hoping my roommate would save herself. I could only think “that’s the largest bat I’ve ever seen!” It wasn’t a bat, it was our favorite local egret. Who the hell has an egret at their house? Huh? Can you answer that? And please keep in mind that we are not living in a bay house. It’s in the middle of one of the largest cities in the U.S.

I’ve named her Margaret.

Here’s where you gain a little knowledge in this story. If you ever need to get rid of bats…the very first thing you should do is call your homeowner’s association and whine. That’s step one. Hopefully you have a homeowner’s association in your back pocket. And hopefully you are not paying as much money for one as me. So after you do that, they will send a bat exclusionist over to your home. I would have preferred for this person to be called a bat eliminator or a bat extinguisher…as that sounds much more permanent…but no, they only exclude them.

When they come out (they will be at your house a few times, be nice to them) they will begin a 3 part process:
1. Seal the interior
2. Net the exit/entry point on the outside – this net allows the bats to leave, but not come back in.
3. Seal the outside after a week of the netting being up.

A few notes that can only be learned from experience – When they seal the interior, you make sure it’s the best sealant that has ever been known to man. For instance, the first time the three part process was started on my house, they tried to use chicken wire to seal the interior of my home with. This did not work…not even close to working. The reason why brings me right into the next tip.

When the netting is put on outside…the bats will go absofreakinlutely crazy. Crazy. Half of them will fly out and then realize they can’t get back in…then the others who hadn’t flown out yet are lunatics. Little bats will be dangling from the net, trying not to let go…as if about to fall from a 10 story building. The others shoot off into the interior of the home and look for a way out there. The chicken wire failed to save me at this point. Next thing you know, you have 3 bats flying around the inside of your home at once. The exclusionist came back out and used massive amounts of caulk at our request.

The last tip I’ll leave you with is this…continue to check the material that they’ve sealed the exterior with. It seems the expandable foam they used last time has a life span of about 2 years. And that’s what leads us to round 2 of the bat experiment.