Sunday, August 31, 2008

A flying trespasser

My partner woke me up at 11 o'clock last night to let me know there was a bat in our house. "I didn't scream this time," he reported to me.

So we're going through our house, him holding a towel and closing doors behind us, me trying to open the windows of the rooms the bat has flown into. After opening one of these windows, I found my face inches from a quarter-sized peach-colored spider with a web that filled the whole window frame. Yikes.

Now, our house is 90 years old. All the windows are original, and amazingly, they all open. Only on one window have the ropes even broken. We opened the weight pockets to repair the ropes, and never got around to closing them.

So of course, the bat lands on the one window in the house with open weight pockets, and crawls right inside. It was probably a very comforting place to hide from people chasing it with towels and turning on bright lights everywhere it flew.

We cleared the window of the spider web (the spider had scurried off, fortunately), and then taped some clear plastic sheeting over the inside of the open window. Hopefully, sometime last night, the bat crawled out of the weight pocket and flew outside.

The bat was small and furry and completely non-aggressive. And it was neat to see how it could crawl using its wings; they're not like bird wings that are useful only for flying. The other time we found a bat in our house (3 years ago), it used its wings to cling to a 2x4 while I carried it outside. But I would have preferred to only experience that cuteness in a zoo, and not in my house.

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