Bats In My Bathroom, Part 3: Bat Man's Name is Chip

This is the Bat Man.

 He came to save us yesterday. As you can see, Bat Man really wears yellow. (I'm sure he keeps his cape in his car.)

He knocked on my door. 

Are you Chip? I asked. He nodded and went straight to work. He was a man of few words, but the Critter Control people told me Chip was one of their best. 

First he looked in my bathroom. (Or "batroom" as Scott calls it.)

"It is terrible, isn't it?" I said. 

"I've seen worse," he said. 

He put on his gloves and took apart the light and fan, letting all the bat guano (new word I learned!) fall into a plastic sack. The bats are all gone now; grown up and flown away, which was the Bat Man's plan all along. 

 Then he took his ladder and put some objects that look like hockey masks over all the vents on the outside of our house. 

For those of you who are still confused about why he came AFTER the bats were gone, let me explain. 

If he had done this a few weeks ago, before the baby bats could fly, he would have trapped baby bats in our house. The parents would not have been able to get in and feed them, and then the babies would have died and their carcasses would have started to rot. Or worse, the baby bats, desperate for food, might have found away into our house. That is why we had to wait for them to grow up. 

Take a look at that ladder! And he wasn't even frightened. 

Chip's job fascinates me and I asked him what animal was his lease favorite to deal with (since he is not only a bat man, but a opossum man, raccoon man, bird man, squirrel man, fox man, ect.) 

He said squirrels are the worst.They are the hardest to remove.  Heaven forbid I get a squirrel in my home.  I have four monkeys, though. 

Ha, ha. 

It took Chip one hour to cleanse our house from bats and to prevent bats from coming back in the future. My hero!

I will not miss the bats, but I hope they haven't gone too far, since I do believe they helped my garden. 

I am seriously thinking of getting a bat box. This is what they look like:

Charming, don't you think? Much better than living in someone's bathroom. 

Bats In My Bathroom, Part 2 (Viewer Discretion Advised)

The photo you are about to see is not pleasant. 

It could make you feel ill. 

Or give you nightmares.

It might send chills up your spine,

or it could put you in a coma. 

It almost puts me in a coma every time I look at it. 

That is why, for a week, I have debated whether or not I should post it.

Perhaps, after you view it you will wish you hadn't, and if you even remotely have a tender tummy, or if you have just eaten a big meal I advise you to stop reading now and look at photos on some one else's blog....

photos of cute babies 

and dogs 

and cupcakes, 

for example.  

What is the photo of, you ask? 

Remember how I told you all that we have bats living in our bathroom? 

Well, we went on a trip for two weeks. 

We shut the door in the bathroom, and tried not to think about it while we were gone.  Perhaps they would be gone when we came home....perhaps they weren't bats after all, but just cute bluebirds. Perhaps the whole thing was just a nightmare. 

But when we came home and peered cautiously into the little room, there was no way we could deny what all of our senses told us; the smell...the sight....and the sounds. 

The bats are still there. 

And from the looks of the size of their droppings, they are large. 

Definitely larger than mice. 

Maybe even small cats. 

Are you sure you want to see it? 

I am warning you. 

This is your last chance. 

Maybe if you just looked at it with one eye.

Or shut both of your eyes and looked at it through your eyelashes. 

Here it comes:

I told you it was awful. 

Looking on the bright side, it does look like they got most of it in the toilet.

Let me remind you that we can't actually see the bats. They are above the light. But now the light is almost completely filled with droppings and it is overflowing out the sides of the vents and falling down over our toilet. 

I called the Bat Man the next day. He said he couldn't do anything about it since the bats in the area still were not grown up yet and if he did anything now they might get into our house and then everyone in my family would have to get rabies shots. 

So he told me to wait another week and they would reassess the bat populations and then call us back. 

A WEEK?!!

So we keep the door closed. 

And locked. (Just in case they are smart bats.)

But I can hear them. 

They squeak and chirp while I am doing my hair and painting my toenails. 

 Fortunately we don't hear them at night because, of course, that is when they are out....

...sucking blood.

We will have to replace our fan and light. And probably the 15-foot pipe that goes through our house to the outside vent. And how are we going to do that? Pry up the ceiling I guess. 

In the meantime I go in there every few days (yes, I am BRAVE), sweep up the bat droppings, flush and sanitize the toilet so that it will be useable again in the future. By humans. 

Now you can go back to the other blogs. 

Blogs about babies, 

and dogs,

and cupcakes. 

Bats in our Bathroom

One morning I heard squeaking and chirping noises coming from this place:

What you are looking at is the light/fan above our toilet in our master bathroom.

I do not like hearing squeaking and chirping noises when I am in the bathroom (by myself!)

 Then, after a few days, black dust began to sift out from the vents around the light, sprinkling the toilet and floor. 

It turns out there are a family of bats living above our toilet. 

This is creepy and I do not like this. 

We called the bat man and he said there is nothing we can do about it until the baby bats grow up. He said to not turn on the the fan because it might kill the babies and then we would have bat carcasses and that would be worse than live bats, since baby bats eventually fly away and dead baby bats start to rot. 

So basically we are raising bats in our bathroom. We are a bat nursery. Bat hatchery. Bat farm.

Sometimes if the light has been off in the bathroom and you turn it on you can hear them flutter around up there. Spooky.

The good thing is that the kids have stopped using the master bathroom.

This is how they get in and out--through the vent on the outside of our house:

After the baby bats grow up and can fly, the bat man will put a special door on this vent that will allow bats to fly out but not back in. 

Until then we have to wait, and I have to keep brushing off the bat dust that lands on my toilet. Ew.

On a happier subject, if were standing there, looking up at this vent and you turned around you would see this: 

 My dragon garden. 

We put a fence around it to keep out the deer and rabbits, turtles and moles, dogs and two-year-olds.

The pumpkins, cantaloupe, beans, squash are all doing well.

I had Syrena plant zinnias around the edges just for fun. I will plant more next time. 

Look at my lettuce! We've had lots of lettuce already this summer and had enough to share with neighbors.

 My corn is not as high as an elephant's eye, but it is as high as mine. I can even "toss the tassels." (Only those who have read my book will understand my little joke...)

Surprisingly I haven't had any insect problems yet in my garden....

...probably because there are a family of bats that live in my house.