So, there I am outside doing whatever and my daughter comes up and tells me that there’s a bat in her room sitting on Patrick - her big stuffed dog.
Obviously, she’s completely imagining things, but I go inside and check and sure enough, there’s a bat in there. I go out and grab some big gloves and a butterfly habitat for it, but it turns out to be dead. No damage that I could see, just sitting there completely stiff. Which is too bad, I even built a bat house in back right above my fence. Ironically, of course, I haven’t seen any in it yet.
Yesterday we’d intended to go to Jellystone Park and spend the night out there, but seeing as how the area hit 101 degrees we decided that we weren’t masochistic enough to stay in a tent. We’d left our back door open, but the screen door closed since the screen door has a doggie door in it. If we’d stayed overnight the dogs would have been able to make it out.
Thing is, before we left we’d closed all the bedroom doors. It would have been easy for something the size of a bat to slip under the door, but if it had done so it would have done it with two dogs relatively nearby.
Other than that, though, I don’t see any possibilities of how it could have gotten in. Maybe through the attic and then through the vent I’d thought, but the trunk line feeding the vent looked pretty tightly connected. The window to her room never gets opened, and I’m pretty sure the screen on it can’t. Her bedroom is as far as you can get from a doorway in the house except for the master bedroom.
It’s always possible that it was in the house longer, maybe even in that room. If so, though, it still would have had to come in through the doggie door or when someone was actively walking through a doorway.
Bats nesting under your roof, and one slipped through a small hole somewhere in the ceiling? Bats are basically mice with wings, and mice can slip through smaller gaps than you’d think.
I hate to be alarmist, but you might want to call your local Animal Control or Natural Resources and ask if the bat should be tested for rabies, and what to do from there. The bat was quite possibly ill from something.
Not sure if this would apply to your house, but I grew up in VT and each summer we would discover several bats flying around the house and every fall before it started to get cold we would have our furnace professionally cleaned and the person doing the cleaning would always find several bat carcasses inside the heating ducts. The most likely explanation was that the bats were coming in through the furnace chimney, and those small enough would enter the house by squeezing through the holes in the heating register.
As Ferret Herder said, bats can slip through almost any opening (they can retract their wings, making them look almost exactly like mice). In fact, I once found a live bat hanging on the back of a framed picture that was hung on a wall.
One of the most traumatic (but hilarious, in retrospect) experiences of my young childhood was when a live bat got into my and my sister’s shared upstairs bedroom and flew around in circles, squeaking madly and flapping frantically, until my dad caught it–poor thing! We had no idea how it got in, either, though.
Please take the dead bat to your local animal control department and have it tested for rabies. Inspect all members of your family for bite marks, and be prepared to be subjected to the rabies vaccine even if you don’t find anything.
Bat bites can be quite small and easily overlooked. It could have bitten any one of you while you were sleeping and you might not notice. The fact that it proceeded to die in your house is a big warning sign.
I don’t mean to alarm you, but please do not ignore this.
as for how it got in there are any number of ways. One is down your chimney/furnace vent. Many furnaces have openings in the front that are a direct pathway up the exhaust channel. It could have gotten into the attic and then a bathroom vent.
But I can’t emphasize enough that a dead bat should be checked for rabies.
Well, for all the concerned folks I’ll have to dig the thing up and call animal control. On the positive side, we have figured out how it got in.
In our guest room there is a small hole in the drywall that I hadn’t fixed yet. I can be reasonably confident that it it came through that hole because my wife’s screams alerted me to the second dead bat. It was stuck partway through the hole. I guess the first one was small enough to squeeze through but the second one wasn’t.
So, I’ve now got two bats buried in my back yard that I’ll apparently get to dig up and call animal control on.
I’ve now blocked the hole and will be patching the hole correctly this weekend while they’re both out of town.
if you don’t patch the hole on the outside then they will still be around. if you patch the drywall then they won’t get into the house interior (they don’t chew through buildings like mice) though they may still nest inside the wall cavity. look on the exterior for a hole or crack that is the size of the one in the drywall or bigger.
bats are nice creatures though, they eat a thousand of mosquitoes in a night. put up a bat house.
