A Brace of Bats

Chez Szondy is home to a colony of over a dozen bats who live in the chimney columns, the house eaves, and far enough inside the garage vent to leave bat poo all over the work bench. It's rather fun having them about-- a bit like having a load of nocturnal barn swallows hanging about. Assuming that barn swallows let off high-pitch squeaks, which I doubt.

But odd thing about bats; they're a bit are like buses. You wait forever and then two show up at once. I learned this the other afternoon when I was playing with my daughter and I noticed an odd furry thing hanging off a large CD album. A furry thing with leathery wings.

Marvelous. Another bat down the flue. And in the middle of the day, too. The last thing I wanted was for the little bleeder to take wing and scare the living daylights out of Emma, so I very carefully picked up the album and slowly walked out the front door. Once on the front path, I gave the album a gentle shake and...

Nothing happened. I shook it more and still nothing. This was new. I not only had a bat hanging off a rather large selection of popular music, but friend bat turned out to be a sound sleeper. More to the point, what does one do with a sound-sleeping bat that has attached itself to a rather large selection of popular music and refuses to leave go? It's not the sort of thing of thing one finds on the average nature programme.

I blame Sir David Attenborough.

After standing out in the front garden long enough to convince the neighbours that I'm completely mad, I remembered my leather gloves over on the potting bench. With these I was able to carefully remove the bat from the album; upsetting him enough that I now had a half-awake bat spreading its wings, baring its tiny teeth and making tiny hissing noises at me. The one thing it wasn't doing was leaving go. In the end, I somehow managed to coax it into a straw hat hanging from a peg by the back door. That's quick enough to write, but doing it took so long that my daughter had time to christen the newest member of our family "Boo the Bat."

I figured that was the end of the episode until my wife came home and said that she could hear a chirping sound. At first we thought it was from the computer or the new satellite dish, but we finally narrowed it down to the living room curtains where another bat (named Sheena by my daughter) was kipping.

If Boo was hard to get rid of, Sheena was bloody impossible. If you can imagine a bat crossed with sticky tape you'd have a pretty good idea of what it was like. Worse, Carl the Cattle Dog had finally figured out that whatever I was playing with was alive and he wanted to get in the act, too, so I had to find somewhere to put Sheena that was out of his reach. All the while it kept getting darker and the the other bats in the colony took into their heads to help out their comrade by dive bombing me.

Ever hear about how bats have sonar and won't hit you because of their incredible ability to sense exactly where you are in the dark? That doesn't keep the little perishers from thumping into you deliberately. That's what these were doing to me, though it was a bit like being pelted with cotton balls, so what they hoped to accomplish is beyond me. By this point, however, Boo had woken up and took off, so after placing Sheena on a window screen, watching her drop into the cucumbers, rescuing her from a curious Carl, and having her velcro herself on to my glove again, I put her on the hat that Boo had vacated. She then proceeded to hang from the rim and despite the deepening night she apparently felt entitled to a but of a lie in. That's gratitude for you.

Not that I should be surprised. Bruce Wayne has a bat invade his home and he ends up as a masked crusader against evil. Me? I have two of the flying rodents deciding to nap in my living room and I find myself killing an evening dodging their relatives while hopping about in my jammies saying "Shoo! Fly, bat! Fly away! Fly! Shoo!" to no effect whatsoever.

Bloody typical.