Batman!

A still from a video of our bat.

They started coming the night before the hearings, swooping through the bedroom as we lay in bed watching the tail end of Lawrence O’Donnell.  The only light in the room was from the TV, but we could see it clearly – a lone brown bat silently flapping its wings in a circle around the room.  It disappeared out the door but soon returned and took another couple of laps around the bedroom before disappearing down the stairs into the darkened first floor. 

We had a bat in East Hampton who during the day lived inside the light fixture outside our front door.  We could see its tiny body hanging upside down inside the fixture, and when it got dark, the bat would be gone for the night foraging for the abundant mosquitoes that lived in the wetlands along the banks of Acabonac Harbor.  He’d be there again in the morning, safely tucked away inside the can-light until he took flight again in the dark.

But that one never came inside.  These bats – there have been at least two over the last few days – for some reason prefer to hunt indoors.  The next one – or maybe it was the same one from the night before – came the night of the hearings, swooping darkly through the living room and kitchen as on the screen even darker matters were revealed.  This time we tried opening the front door and shooing him (or her) out into the night without success.  That bat was enjoying the good life indoors and refused to leave.

Finally, after the hearings were over and we were ready to go upstairs to bed, I opened the front door again and gave the shooing thing another shot.  Nope.  I decided to follow the bat as he made his rounds.  After making several passes through the downstairs with brief detours up the staircase, he would alight within a fold in one of the curtains, peeking through to keep an eye on us.  I decided to grab him and show him to the door, but nothing doing.  He was out of the curtain in a flash and back to swooping expertly from one room to another.

Finally Tracy went upstairs and I turned down the lights and the bat decided to take a rest atop one of our bookshelves.  I quickly put on a pair of work gloves and quietly made my approach.  Got him! 

I cupped him within my gloves and exited the still-open front door and gave him flight and he flapped away into the night.

We thought we had seen the last of the bats when another one swept through the living room last night, quickly establishing a similar set of rounds – through the downstairs, up the staircase, around the bedrooms, back down the stairs and through the kitchen into the living room again.

It was thrilling watching another bat flying through the space where we live, making great sweeping curves around the corners of walls and quick reversals at the end of the room, diving down between two chairs to ride a cushion of air along the rug like it was a magic carpet.

Soon, however, he appeared to tire and was landing for a rest every couple of minutes.  This time I waited until he burrowed between the folds in one of the curtains and using the work gloves again, cradled him out of there.  I could feel him moving in my cupped hands as Tracy opened the front door and once again I walked to the edge of the porch and let him go.  He dove through the opening in the hedge at the end of the walk and was gone.

At the turn of the last century when Milford, Pennsylvania, was establishing itself as a summer weekend getaway for families from New York and Philadelphia, local hotels advertised that the area was mosquito and malaria free because colonies of bats lived in caves along the bluffs above the river.

Some of them apparently still do, at least when they’re not exploring the corners of our home just a block from the same bluffs advertised as harboring colonies of bats more than a century ago.