Don't Leave Them Hanging

One of the more vivid memories from my childhood is the summer night a bat made its way down our chimney, landed on the birch logs arranged in our parlor fireplace, and then launched itself into the air, looping through our house in wide arcs, diving at our heads while we ran about screaming. My little brother dove under the dining-room table, my father ran around in search of a net, and my sister with her long, vulnerable tresses dashed to the bathroom—while I watched our cat, a sleek Siamese, coolly sizing up the situation. Finally, in one well-aimed jump, he leaped from the couch, swatted the bat to the ground, and shook it dead. Never before, and not since, have I seen death meted out so efficiently.

Bats are malleable, able to wiggle through holes no wider than a pinkie finger. We would occasionally find a pioneer settlement of them in our attic, clinging upside-down to a roof truss, asleep through the winter, their wings drawn about them like blankets. My brother Glenn had told me bats would lay eggs in my hair and drive me mad. Though I knew mammals didn’t lay eggs, any oddity seemed possible for a bat, and I believed it for years. My father had a more charitable view of bats, knowing they ate mosquitoes, and would urge detente whenever a lone scout made its way out of the attic and into our quarters in search of new land.

Though I grew up with these occasional visitors, I had not personally encountered one since leaving home 30 years ago, so I was unprepared when my younger son yelled out in the middle of the night that one was circling his bedroom. Most North American bats fly using echolocation, creating echoes that return to the bat, allowing it to gauge the location and size of objects. Still, this bat was no match for my son’s ceiling fan and flew straight into a blade, which hurled it into the wall. The bat slid down the wall and sprawled on the floor like a drunken cowboy in a bar fight, down for the count. I donned gloves, picked up the bat, carried it outside, and placed it in the crook of a tree, away from predators, so he could sleep it off. I’m assuming it was a he, since the male of any species is the gender most inclined to ignore boundaries.

Two nights later, just as my wife and I were settling into bed, a bat flew out of our closet and did laps around the room. A bat at recess, blowing off the stink. Word had apparently spread about ceiling fans; this one avoided it. I ran to the basement to get a fishing net, yelling at my sons to take cover. My wife walked calmly to the window, lifted the sash, removed the screen, snapped her fingers, and pointed outside; the bat, recognizing a school librarian accustomed to compliance, hustled to the window and out into the dark.

Bat No. 3 visited four days later, just after supper. I was seated by the kitchen woodstove reading, my sons were at the kitchen table doing homework, and my wife was out for her evening walk when a bat hobbled out of our dining room, limped across the kitchen, and creaked up the stairs, its knees popping with arthritis.

My sons and I followed it into the upstairs bathroom. It was lying in our bathtub, pulled over at a rest stop, weary of travel, a granddaddy of a bat, old and wizened, gray hair sprouting from its nose and ears, just like my grandfather Hank in his last years. I bore him to the now-familiar tree and left him there.

The fourth bat came the following evening, up from the basement, streaking past my wife as she was carrying a basketload of laundry down the stairs. This one was a thug, vigorous and aggressive. A terrific fight ensued that ended poorly for the bat, who lost its life when my older son sent it to glory by means of a well-aimed swing with a cookie sheet. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and buried it in the fence row next to the woodpile.

The next day I phoned a man named Chad, whose name I had found in the phone book under the heading “Wildlife Removal.” I explained our predicament. Chad said that if four bats had visited our home in a week, we most likely had a colony of 30–100 bats in our attic. I wanted to kill them, my Quaker inclination toward pacifism now gone.

“I don’t kill bats,” Chad said. “It’s against the law. I exclude them.”

He arrived early the next day in a white van, brisk and businesslike, scarcely pausing to shake my hand before heading to our attic. I followed closely behind him, armed with a skillet. “Guano,” he said, pointing to a small black clump of excrement. “They’re here.”

He followed the clumps—like breadcrumbs thoughtfully left by the bats—to a small hole beneath the attic window. We contemplated the opening, no bigger than a dime. “That’s where they came in,” Chad said somberly.

“Let’s plug it,” I said.

“No good,” he said. “They’ll be trapped inside, die inside your walls, and stink up the place. We’ve got to get them out.”

He returned to his van, where he rigged up some PVC pipe he then attached to the outside of the house, aiming it downward from the hole. “Around dusk, they’ll leave through the tube.”

“What’s to keep them from coming back in the same way?” I asked.

“The tube’s pointed downward,” Chad explained. “They can’t climb up it because it’s slick. Nothing for them to grab hold of.”

That evening, at dusk, I sat in a lawn chair in my driveway, watching the bats tumble out of the tube one after the other and then flap off into the night in search of food and new digs, the plight of refugees the world over.

A few of them circled our house, looking for a way back home, a common yearning for men and beasts. A lone scout tried to scale the pipe but slid down, unable to gain purchase. I watched him try again and again, remembered my hunger for home when life assailed. I pitied the bat and thought of giving him a leg up, just as my brothers and I had hoisted each other to the lowest branch of a tree, back in the days of youth when our legs were short and our aspirations high. But there is only room for so many mammals in my home, and the bat, like me, will have to find his own.