The day my son, Jason, discovered a dead bat on my terrace was a lucky day, indeed. Only in retrospect, can I say that.
At the end of June, I noticed an unusual amount of animal droppings in my terrace. I thought it was from mice. After all, when I moved into my new home, one of the first things I did was call an exterminator to move mountains of mouse poop and dead mice from inside my home. I hadn’t seen signs of mice since last October.
When I noticed the increased pile of rodent poop, I brought mouse poison in from the garage and placed it in the terrace. It didn’t work. The droppings only became more obvious. Then I saw what I thought was a dead mouse. Luckily, Jason was coming to give me a ride to my grandson’s baseball game.
“Jason, while you are here, can you get rid of this dead mouse for me? I’m squeamish around dead animals.”
“Mom, that’s not a dead mouse. That’s a bat!”
Jason scooped up the bat, put it in a paper bag, and dropped it in the trash. I googled “bat poop” and learned that “it’s often mistaken for mouse poop.” I called the exterminator right away.
My original exterminator only deals with mice, rats and bugs. He told me to call his friend, Jake, who owns his own company, Envirocritters, and “relocates” small animals, including bats.
Jake came the next day and confirmed that I definitely had bat poop in my terrace and bats in my attic. He showed me where the bats had come in from holes near the roof. They had probably been coming in for years, and recently migrated back to Colorado from their winter home. He explained how he would plug the holes and then add exclusion traps that would allow the bats to fly out of the house, but not return.
I loved getting to know Jake. He is a happy, friendly guy who loves his job relocating animals ~ except maybe occasionally when an animal doesn’t take kindly to his invitation to “move along.”
In addition to removing bats, Jake gets rid of squirrels, skunks, raccoons, pigeons and woodpeckers, snakes (including rattlesnakes), foxes and coyotes, gophers and voles, bees and wasps, and rabbits. When he comes across a box turtle, he keeps it in an enclosure in his back yard. They are his pets.
“Oh, ha!” I told Jake that I had a rabbit living under my house. He said he could relocate the rabbit, as well.
Soon the bats were gone. The pile of poop got smaller every day. Fredy (my friend who lives upstairs with his wife, Paula) found one more dead bat trying to escape through the attic fan. I saw the last bat fly out of the terrace on the 4th of July.
But this is not where my story ends. Oh, no! After the bats were gone, I discovered a much more horrible pest in my house: Bat Bugs! They are a first cousin to bed bugs, but feast on bat blood. When bats are removed, they turn to humans. Ay, no!!!
Fredy saw two live bat bugs upstairs, and I saw two more in my living quarters. I took pictures and sent them to my original exterminator, who confirmed that bat bugs look like bed bugs, “but their bite is much worse.”. He said he could get rid of them “but it isn’t easy.” I was lucky that no one had been bitten (yet!) and there were no brown stains on the sheets.
The process of getting rid of bat bugs is the same as for bed bugs: Lots of heat and strong poison. All bedding and clothing had to be washed in hot water and dried for 30 minutes at the hottest possible dryer temperature. Mattresses needed to be removed from the beds, and placed upright on the floor. All drawers needed to be emptied and removed from the dressers.
Furniture needed to be moved away from walls, exposing all baseboards. Clean clothes needed to be stored in black plastic bags until the whole process was finished.
Jason helped me move furniture and carry bags of clothing and bedding to and from the basement. The exterminator came last week for round one and returns today to finish the job. With luck, poison, and the Colorado heat, every last one of the nasty bugs will be dead.
And then starts the process of putting everything back together again.
What will be my most lasting memory of the Summer of 2024? You guessed it. It is the year of bats, bugs and bunnies.
