bats

When I go away for more than a couple of days, I like to find a housesitter. While Freya would be okay with someone dropping by once or twice a day for some food and a couple of pets, she wouldn't be happy. She likes to be around people. She likes for people to make laps so she can sit in them. She likes for people to lie down so she can purr a bit and then flop down on them, and then spoon with them after she slides down their side. That's the kind of cat she is.

I like to find a housesitter who would appreciate a week or so on their own - someone who lives out in the burbs, or who has roomies, or misses cats, or something. They're doing me a huge favour by staying Chez Butch, so I like to feel like I'm doing them a bit of a favour back.

Ian was a perfect candidate: roommated and cat-misser. But I think he got a little more than he bargained for.

The Wednesday before I left, he came over and I gave him a tour and we went over the notes I'd made for him. The entire page of notes I'd made for him. Apartment quirks, what to do in case Freya got sick, contact numbers for friends. I called the vet and gave them his name, I emailed Grace to see if she'd be available to drive Ian and Freya to the vet's in case of an emergency, I called my landlord to tell him that if there were a problem, Ian would call. I left my upstairs neighbours a note. I left Ian detailed notes about all the people who knew.

In short, I went kind of bonkers. I'm still not quite sure what tick had gotten under my skin, because jesus, I even emailed Ian from Halifax to give him yet one more ridiculous "just in case" instruction. He must have thought the place and my pet, not to mention my brain, were made of glass.

Point 5 under "apartment quirks" (right under "turn shower taps 5 times for water") was "ants, mice, bats." Listed from least to most scary. Ian was holding the paper as we went over it. His eyebrows shot up. "Bats? For real?"

"Yeah, sadly. It's high season too." I paused, feeling guilty. "I probably should have mentioned the bats beforehand. But you probably won't get one." He couldn't tell, but I was crossing all my fingers and and all my toes.

When I got home from the 'fax, there was a note on the table. "And check the phone message from Mark," it said, "Pretty funny." Now Mark is a funny guy prone to making penis jokes, or, well, drawing penis jokes. So that's what I had in mind when I checked the message. It was not a rude joke about the male member, but detailed instructions on how to deal with bats. As soon as I realized he was serious, I gasped and looked around the room. My eyes instantly zeroed in on the guano on the wall above the TV. Poor poor Ian, I thought, what a housesitting disaster.

I was thinking, too, about the cat puke.

Steve and I picked Eric up at the Halifax airport on Sunday night. After all the hellos and the settling in, Eric and I sat out on the lanai in the dark. He seemed a little quiet, maybe a little tense, but I put it down to travelling and being somewhere new. We chatted, there was a lull. He turned towards me.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said. I could feel the shot immediately, each molecule of adrenaline another worst case. "Freya's okay, I went and checked," he continued, and my shoulders came down from around my ears. "But she threw up on your bed." I started breathing again. "On your new sheets."

Aha.

"But she's fine?"
"Yep, she seemed normal."
"Ah well, sheets are sheets. If Freya's fine, I can buy new sheets."
"And no one's slept on them."

As it turns out, I don't even have to buy new sheets, because Housesitter Ian did an amazing job of cleaning them when the stain was fresh. He washed them. Twice. With stain remover. He washed my mattress, even.

I'm not sure a medal is good enough.

I’m going to have to call the patent office and have them remove my application for “Butcher’s Amazing Bat Removal System.” Early Saturday morning I discovered that the system relies too heavily upon bat behaviour being predictable. It is certainly not predictable

At 4:55 am, I awoke to the now familiar sound of a bat squeaking and flapping up out of my basement. It’s sad, but I’m getting used to it. I didn’t leap out of bed swearing, sweating, shaking, or with pounding heart. I rolled on my back, stared at the ceiling, breathed “motherfucker” and calmly reached over to snap my bedside light off.

Off? you ask. Were you not just asleep? Is it not common practice to have the lights already off while resting?

Indeed, the system was thrown out of whack from the start.

I’d woken up at 1 am to the flashing lights and grinding scrape of someone in a big truck clearing snow from the parking lot behind my apartment. I’m sure the people who use the lot were grateful when they showed up the next morning. I, however, I lay in bed getting my cranky pants on until I decided to just give up on sleep and read for a bit.

Worked like a charm. I turned the light on and promptly fell back asleep.

So when the bat woke me up, my first thought after “motherfucker” was that it would be attracted to the only light on in the apartment. I may be getting used to bats, but I am certainly not ready to take one on naked. Luckily, I got the light off before the bat decided to join me in my boudoir.

A moment or two later, I was berobed and bespectacled. Poked my head out in the hall, looked to the right, where I fully expected Freya to have cornered the rodent by the doorway to the kitchen. This has been regular procedure up until now.

No cat. No bat. No dice. I looked to the left. There was Freya at the other end of the hall, looking up at the living room ceiling. Her work done, I scooped her up and shut her in the bedroom.

The bat seemed to be not-so-happily flapping confused circles around my living room. Following BABRS protocol, I opened my apartment door, then the front door to the house, and turned the light on the in the vestibule.

No dice.

Instead of smelling the sweet outdoors and making a beeline towards the light, the bat just kept looping, splopping into the wall every once in a while and scrabbling for purchase.

I waited. I put my coat on. I turned the heat up. I listened to the bat loop loop scrabble in the top northeast corner, loop loop scrabble against the west wall. I turned the light on in the living room. I turned the light off in the living room. I turned the light on in the hall. I turned the light off in the hall. I turned myself about.

It got more and more tired, its loops lower and lower as the minutes wore on. I got more tired and more cold. At one point when its loops were midway down the wall, it did actually fly out of the living room. And directly at me. At face level. I gasped and flapped my hands around. It gasped, stopped dead for a half-second in mid-air and went back into the living room. Flying up near the ceiling again.

At 5:15 am it landed, hanging upside down from the end of my curtain rod. Now, with all this bat business over the past year, with a trip to Preston Hardware on Friday morning during which I actually thought, “Hey, while I’m here buying 30’ of rope at 8 am, I should also get some heavy leather gloves for bat catching,” you might think I would have a pair of heavy leather gloves with which to grab a bat at rest.

I do not. So.

Figuring it was almost light, figuring the bat was tired, figuring the bat would stay put. Figuring that Steve, being the kind kind soul he is, would be able to bring his manly gloves over to my house not long after light struck, figuring it wouldn’t take much time to remove the bat very obviously hanging out in the open before we left for the cottage.

I went back to bed. Shutting the door behind me. Figuring wrong.

The bat was gone in the morning. I did eventually find it hanging off the side of my computer tower beside the wall. It was so groggy with daylight and exhaustion that it didn’t even start squeaking when Steve and His Manly Gloves captured it and took it outside.

Obviously, I have to call my landlord, but from what I understand, once you got bats, you got bats. The house I live in is over 100 years old. There are more than a few hidden, quarter-sized holes. Even if all the bats are actually found and removed from the attic, the chances of them not getting back in are pretty small.

I love my apartment. I have been safe and happy here. When I walk up the block, I can feel that stretching out towards me. The location is perfect – two blocks from Eric, two blocks from the Grs, three blocks from Mitch, close to Centretown fun.

But I do not love bats. I do not love unpredictability. My unpredictable bat situation might just overpower my love for this apartment.

Or maybe I’ll just stop being a princess, buy some fucking gloves already, submit an application to the patent office for a Bat Removal Kit and suck. It. Up.

On New Year's Day I went into my basement with the idea that I was going to clean it out. There's a big pile of crap in the middle of the floor that I've been meaning to put out for ages. And just general reorganization of stuff to do. But I have a creepy basement. Lots of spiders. Not much light. So I don't really like to spend much time down there.

New Year's Day, though, I was bound and determined to do something about this. I turned on the light, walked down the stairs and as I got to eye level with the rafters, I thought I saw a dark shape flitting across the room. It was a slight movement out of the corner of my eye, so I convinced myself I was seeing things. After all, I would much rather be hallucinating than seeing a bat.

So I went all the way down and started moving boxes of empties around and lining my different sizes of screws up, and trying to pretend that spiders don't exist, etc. etc., when I noticed that Freya was acting a little weird. Pacing back and forth. Near the washing machine. "Oh well," I thought, "spiders don't exist."

And then I heard the squeaking. It was clear and prolonged and very definitely bat-like. "Oh well," I thought, "spiders don't exist. It's probably mice. In the wall." Nevertheless, I left the basement and haven't been back down since. And I need to do laundry something awful. But that back corner where I think there may be mice, in the wall, is right above my washing machine. In which I found a bat last January.

Jennifer offered to shine a light into that back corner to see if there were bats, but I forgot to get her to do that when she dropped me off after Girl Detective practice. Last night I asked Greg if he would come over and shine a light into that back corner sometime this weekend, which he kindly agreed to do.

It may be a case of shutting the barn door, however. This morning at 4 am I awoke to the leathery flapping and screeing of a very frightened bat, and the excited padding and jumping of my cat. My heart was pounding, but after last summer (see posts from July and August '06), I have a very efficient Bat Removal System (patent pending) in place.

After ascertaining that the bat was not in my bedroom, I got up, closed the door and Step 1: put some clothes on. Long sleeved and long pantsed clothes. Of course, because I've once more gotten used to not having bats in my house, my glasses were in the bathroom, where I take them off to perform my evening ablutions. So a little defenseless, but feeling good for having fairly thick material between me and the flying mammal.

I went out into the hall, heard no flying or squeaking, so crouched and slunk down the long hall to the front door. Why the slinking, I don't know, since it would make no difference to the bat if I were 5' 7" or 4' 2". But it made me feel better and I am all over the placebo effect.

Step 2: I opened up the apartment door, opened up the front door of the house. Turned on the light in the vestibule. When I turned around, Freya had obviously cornered her prey either behind the full length mirror propped against the wall at the far end of the hall or behind the card table I rescued from the garbage and had yet to take into the basement because I was afraid of the mice in the wall in that back corner. Oh, irony, how I love your leathery grasp.

Sadly, my glasses and the next steps of the Bat Removal System required me going past that mirror, and all I could envision was getting to that fairly enclosed part of my house - the only part of my house with a low ceiling - only to have the bat fly out and the cat fly up and me in between. Screaming and uselessly flapping my hands. But it had to be done, so I told myself to suck it up.

A slink down the hall, a very quick pass by the mirror, and I was safe in the bathroom and no longer blind. Step 3: Scooping Freya up, I enclosed her in the bedroom, 1) to get her out of the way and 2) to prevent the bat from ending up in my bedroom.

Step 3: I flipped the kitchen light on to 1) orient myself to the bat and 2) jostle it into moving towards the light at the other end of the tunnel. Because once a bat gets going and can locate the outdoors through smell and light (bats can see, which is why it is important to have the light on near the exit), that is where it wants to go. Away from humans.

But this bat was not long out of hibernation and pretty sluggish. Kitchen light on, I moved the mirror, and it moved a little bit. I got ready to duck. But it didn't fly, hardly moved.

Step 4: Thankful that I am a person who knows to Always Be Prepared, and feels that part of Always Being Prepared is having an emergency flashlight in every room,* I grabbed my kitchen emergency flashlight, and put the bat that had wedged itself between the floor and the trim into the spotlight.

It started crawling.

(I'm not sure where I stand on the age-old question "Which is creepier - a bat flying or crawling?" because there are points on either side. Crawling bats look really fucking creepy, what with their wiggling outstreched wings, especially when they are crawling all zig zaggy down your hall to sweet sweet freedom. But at least you know where they are and can predict where they are going with amazing accuracy. The same cannot be said of flying bats. I think I must come down in favour of crawling bats.)

I think it was crawling not so much towards the open door, as towards the spotlight I kept just ahead of it. At one point, it veered off and tried to go into the living room, but I headed it off by shining the light into its bastard eyes and it veered back again and crawled outside.

Luckily it was a very warm night,** so I didn't have to freeze my flaps off through this procedure. It did give me witnesses though, and lord knows what my neighbours, ending a party on their front porch in the damp spring-like air, thought about me marching out my front door with a flashlight trained on a crawling bat, then quickly whipping around and desperately working the screen door doohickey in the hopes that I could get it closed before the bat started flying and flew back in.

This was all accomplished in under 10 mintues. And the first 5 were me sweating and swearing in my bedroom behind a closed door. See? Efficient Bat Removal System.

Having Greg shine a light into that back corner might indeed be locking the barn door after the horse is gone. But what if there's more than one horse? We need to know how big the team is.

*Other ways of Always Being Prepared:
- If you generally use a cordless phone, have a non-cordless phone stashed somewhere handy in case of a power failure. Know where the jack is, so you don't have to hunt for it with an emergency flashlight.
- Practice using your non-dominant side. That way, if a stroke ever renders your dominant side useless, you will still be able to write, feed yourself and get dressed.

**Luckily? Maybe not. This warmth is at least partially responsible for confusing the bat in the first place.

Huh. I've been highlighted (along with Francis Heaney, who I just discovered writes good blog) in a very funny post on the Elgin Street Irregulars about polyamory.

The book mentioned as a link, though terribly written, is a great practical guide. My favourite line, from the MISTAKES section:

You are not choosing lovers because they are perfect. You certainly are not.

But there's some pretty damn good advice in there. Realistic advice, like rules aren't that useful, so how about a "flexible arrangement" or "norms" instead. I like that flexible arrangement idea.

If I end up using myself as a guinea pig, I'll keep you posted.

Okay, this is the end of my bat news. Sorry to have become so obsessed there for a few days. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency took away the bat that Freya killed and tested it for rabies. I got two calls about it. The CFIA called me at work to say, No worries, no rabies. Great I thought, fuck those bats, I'm letting her loose on them.

When I got home that night there was also a message from the city, and oh boy, do I wish I had the technology to record that and post it here. Here's a transcript.

Hi   uh   good afternoon   this is Ottawa Public Health calling      to advise Megan Butcher that the bat that was picked up   was tested and the bat did not have rabies the bat. DID NOT. have rabies. If you'd like more information  give me a call please at

Other than that, I'm wasting time here because I've started a companion piece to the She's So Heavy series, and it's hard and now I'm sad. I have heavy boots, as Jonathan Safran Foer would write.

I feel like crying.

Not because of my date last night, which was pretty fucking stellar. We did not go for a walk by the river.

Twenty minutes after she left, however, there was a decided turn for the worse with another bat incident. Again, just after I’d taken my glasses off in another room. At least I had clothes on this time.

I managed to scuttle around for a bit, crawling commando style up and down the hallway, turning lights on here, opening doors to the outside, turning lights off there. At one point I grabbed the phone, crouched in the doorway to the living room, and called the city.

Me: I have a bat in my house.
Louise: Did it bite anyone?
M (stupidly): No.
L: I’m sorry, we can’t help you. Our mandate is only for bites. You’ll have to capture it and let it go outside.
M: And if it bites me while I’m doing that?
L: You should call back.

It flew out after not very long, and I thought, “Phew. That’s that for tonight. But I’d better bring Freya’s litter upstairs and close the basement door, just in case.” While I was down there, another bat swooped out of a corner and flapped all around the basement. I ran upstairs, litter box in hand, and slammed the door.

I get to bed and it’s around midnight. A little late, but I’m wired, so I read a bit, then turn off the light. I’ve just managed to relax some when I hear a thump on the basement door. Fuck, I think, there’s an inch gap at the bottom of that door. So up I get, turn on the lights, find an old sheet, shove it in the crack.

Get back to bed. Thump. Thump thump. Squeak squeak. And Freya’s gone uncanny, pulling at the sheet to get at the bat and yowling. Quiet for a bit. Thump thump thump.

It was 3.30 before I fell asleep deeply enough not to hear the next thump. Poor bat.

Today, I’ve discovered that Todd from Nature Care is “100% positive that the bats are in the attic, and taking a left turn when they should be taking a right.” And thus ending up in my basement instead of the glorious dusky outdoors. Though how he knows my basement is to the left of the attic, I’m not sure. No matter, there’s nothing I can do about the bats except wait for the young to grow old enough to leave the roost. Another two weeks, according to Todd.

I’m already jumping every time I hear a squeak anywhere, or a pigeon takes wing from the building across the street. I’ll be raving mad in two weeks.

Might be easier to handle the bats that way. At any rate, tonight I’m buying a pair of heavy work gloves, and I’m duct taping sheets over various doorways to keep the bats contained in the hallway. That way I can find them easier in the morning.

Cause you know there’s nothing I look forward to more than opening my bedroom door in the morning and playing a little find-the-flying-mammal. Sets a day up right.

After things calm down, it will cost anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars to get rid of the bats, depending on how many quarter-sized holes need blocking up in the attic. My landlord is going to fucking love that.

Fuck this no sugar bullshit. I’m going to get a cooky.

Yeah, I know, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. I think I was sick over the holidays. Either that, or the family visiting wore me out so much I couldn't find the strength to do so anything but sloth for the rest of my time off. The Beard walked in here at one point and said "Jesus, your apartment's a mess." Considering that my (probably neurotic) need for order is one of the reasons we no longer live together, I was impressed he managed to say it without rancour. And it was no less than the truth.

In other news...

Once I thought I could live with bats. I found out this week I was kidding myself.

I hadn't done laundry since before Christmas, and here we were after New Year's. I take a load down to the basement, plonk it on the laundry table, start the cycle, scoop the soap, stick my arm into the machine and shake it shake it to distribute the detergent evenly. And then I check the tub. For what, I'm not sure. An errant sock, perhaps?

There was no errant sock, just a quivering mammal. The back of a brown furry mammal hanging upside down. I screamed like a girl. And believe you me, I've tried to find another way of describing the sound I made, but it was a high pitched, shrieky blast of "motherfucking hell what in the fuck is that in my machine?". The correct answer, my dears, is Myotis lucifugus, or one Little Brown Bat. The poor wee beastie only breathed a little faster after my scream.

After my reversion to stereotypcial femininity, I carefully closed the lid of the washing machine, marched upstairs, closed the basement door (uh, just in case the sick tiny bat managed to open the machine lid), and went straight to google. I was on the phone with the City of Ottawa in a few minutes, and after the two phone calls it took to assure Shelley from Bylaw that there was no way the bat came anywhere close to biting me, and an hour's wait, three bylaw officers were on my doorstep to rescue me from the creature with no intention of hurting me.

They took it away to be euthanized, a more humane death than freezing in a snowbank, the only death I could have offered it. At least according to the Humane Society webpage.

It's good to know what you can and can't live with. I've taken bats off the can-do list.

I dreamt of bats all night.

Flying; crawling; grinning plastic bats hanging from the basement ceiling. Real bats hanging amongst the garlands of fakes.

Took my cat, Freya, to the vet two nights ago and she couldn’t get her rabies vaccine because she’s immunocompromised. How’s that for a cat? Turns out she’s probably got eosinophilic granuloma complex – skin rash (do not look at pictures of this on the internet) – and irritable bowel disease – not to be confused with IBS. Sheesh. Which means that she can’t get a vaccine that might make her sick even if she didn’t have skin and poo problems.

This wouldn’t be an issue at all if I weren’t going to be moving into a house in November that had resident bats in the basement. I like bats, and was considering living peacefully with them. The bats would eat the spiders and the cat would keep the bats in line, most likely teaching them a lesson if they dared up into living quarters. Sad only for multi-legged pesties.

The nice man at the Organization for Bat Conservation in Bloomfield Hills, MI. gently suggested I evict them. But I wasn’t convinced. Spider-free house, I kept thinking. No millipedes. That’s something.

But immunocompromised cat takes the cake and makes the difference. Out go the bats. Humanely, those poor things.