A Bat Pays a Visit
And other encounters with airborne animals...
There she was, hunched over her iPad at her desk, minding her own business, when she felt a flutter near her head.
Surely, a moth.
A large moth?
A bat.
A BAT!
That’s when I heard my wife’s study door slam and her cries of alarm.
This was not her first bat encounter.
Once, as a child vacationing in Italy, my wife’s older sister, wanting to be the first to claim her bedroom in the rustic farmhouse they were renting, came running downstairs:
C’è un pulcinello nel mio letto!
Which surprised the caretaker, as in Italian that means:
There’s a clown in my bed!
Even in Italy, with its fanciful operas and 1950s art-house cinema, this would be unusual.
What she meant to say was:
C’è un pipistrello nel mio letto!
Isn’t “pipistrello” a wonderful word? Hard to be scared of a pipistrello. Anyway, there it was, sleeping comfortably on my sister-in-law’s bed, a considerable upgrade on a cave, I would think.
My wife has had many encounters with flying animals, maybe even more than Tippi Hedren.
Seagulls have been a recurring problem. On the beach, they have stolen cheese sandwiches from her, often working in pairs. One distracts by removing her hat, the other swoops in and takes the food.
“Flying rats,” she says. She really likes cheese sandwiches.
Just after Covid, when we were all returning to work, she got dive-bombed by a northern mockingbird. It had found a nesting spot on a lamppost at the once all-but-abandoned city-bound Metro North platform. Now that commuters began to come back, the bird was defending its territory.
I was worried that this was a case of life imitating art, and that soon all the birds would rise against us. I would beg for mercy, remind them I put out suet every winter.
Only the woodpeckers would care.
As you probably know, bats are great birds to have around, as they eat so many insects. Yes, I know, some “scientists” consider them mammals, but these are the same people who claim that whales are mammals, too.
I defer to no less an authority than Ishmael from Moby-Dick:
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me […] A whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him.
While Ishmael may not be an actual person, I’ll go with his first-hand knowledge.
But let’s return to our latest bat run-in.
Having ascertained that the moth touching her hair was not a moth, my wife fled the room and closed the door. I sprang into action, slipping into the study and shutting the door behind me. It was a big bat, circling the room. I opened two windows for it to be able to echolocate its way out, and left, shutting the door behind me.
A few minutes later, I peeked in and it was gone.
The next day we had a bat expert come check the house for other bats. Fortunately he didn’t find any. He believes a young bat got in somehow—the man found a tiny hole by the chimney—and should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque trying to get back out but wound up in the bedroom instead.
He said this week and next week are his two biggest weeks of the year, as the young bats are more active now.
He also said you’re supposed to kill the bat so it can be tested for rabies. I’m glad we didn’t know that.
Why test, when you can just wait to see if you start foaming at the mouth?
I'd like to get a t-shirt that says "There's A Clown In My Bed" but something tells me my husband would take exception.
For the record, I think I would rather find a bat in my bed than a clown.