The thing with the bats

What is crapping all over the front of my house: little brown bats. They're not even the cute kind.

A few years ago in late spring, what I thought were mouse turds started appearing all over out stoop and right in front of the garage.

“Wouldn’t mice rather be in the house eating the crumbs of food my children leave everywhere, scurrying through our walls in a terrifying manner and building nests in our air conditioner?” I thought. “Why are they hanging out at the front of our house and crapping all over the concrete?”

I never saw any mice or any evidence of them or any other rodent. Nothing but the poop that would appear every morning after we swept it away the night before. And then one day, the mystery was solved by what I thought was a flower petal on our stoop. Which was weird because I didn’t have any flowers there.  I bent down closer and saw it wasn’t a flower petal: it was a baby bat. A dead one. 

That was when we realized it wasn’t mouse turds everywhere but guano. As soon as the bat turds invaded our lives, however, they left. They returned in the fall. And so it has been for the last several years: we get visited by guano all over the driveway and stoop every late spring and fall. I’m sure there are bats to accompany all of the turds, but we pretty much never see them: just the digested presents they leave where my kids like to draw with sidewalk chalk. 

Since they started coming, we’ve had our house re-roofed and wood rot repaired. Both contractors said they could see no way for bats to get into our house, and we’ve looked in our attic and found nothing. Our next-door neighbors on either side of us have no bat visitors. For some reason, the front of our home is their special migratory stopover hot spot/shit hole. 

They eat mosquitoes and everything, so we decided not to evict them (which I wouldn’t even know how to do if I wanted to). But they’re over-staying their welcome this year, and it’s taken a turn for the macabre. They’ve been here for well over a month. It’s usually only a few weeks. My kids now know the evening ritual after we all get home: get the outside broom (distinct from the inside broom, which notably does not come into contact with the feces of flying mammals) and sweep the bat turds into the grass. We even got the kids their own little outdoor broom so they could participate in the family bat-turd sweeping. 

A couple weeks ago, however, another dead baby bat showed up on our stoop. And a few days later, another. Bats are shitty parents, you guys. I did some research, and apparently the babies hang onto the moms while they fly around eating bugs. Hey bat moms, guess what I spent the whole of my children’s infancies desperately trying not to do? Drop them! Way to go, bat moms. You had one job. 

On the evening we found the second baby bat, we heard another bat. We looked up onto our roof, and finally, in all the years of seeing only turds and dead babies, we saw an adult one. It was staring down at us and yelling (or what I imagine to be how a bat yells in its barely audible high-pitch squeal). 

“I think she’s telling us how sad she is that her baby died,” my husband said. 

Oh good, because I need guilt to go with the nightly turd sweeping. 

Then the next day, we find a dead adult bat on the stoop. 

Husband: “Maybe she wasn’t telling us that she was sad about the baby. Maybe she was telling us she was in horrible pain and asking for help.” 

More guilt atop guano. 

At this point I decide to call the experts and get put through to an “urban wildlife biologist” at the Missouri Department of Conservation. I tell him about our dead bats. He informs me that I’m the first bat call he’s had this year, and he sounds a little excited about it. 

He says there are probably two reasons the bats are dying: either West Nile Virus or rabies. Neither of these explanations is comforting. He does say the babies were probably dropped by their mothers. (Where is bat DFS?!) He assures me bats only give people rabies if people find them on the ground or on the low part of a tree and try to pick them up. 

He asks what we did with the dead bats. I told him we swept them into the lawn where I was hoping nature’s clean-up crew would do their jobs. He said I needed to go pick them up with gloves and put them in the trash because if another animal came and ate them, they could get West Nile Virus or rabies. You know what does not sound like my idea of a good time? Picking up decomposing bat carcasses, gloves or not. (Luckily, I have plenty of disposable gloves on hand for meat-touching). I waited until it was mostly dark outside so I couldn’t really see them and did it on trash night. My husband was too squeamish. 

I asked the urban wildlife biologist if I could put a bat house for them in one of our trees so that maybe they’d do all their crapping there and not all over the front of my house. He said I could try it, and he just happened to have one in his office. He then personally delivered it to my office, all at no cost. For real. 

Ladies: just let me say, if you can get this man to deliver you a bat box, do it. If I were writing a romance novel about an urban wildlife biologist, the male lead would look like him. He also offered to carry it up to my office (it’s like 2 feet by 3 feet and 6 inches deep - not the birdhouse I was expecting); and I stupidly refused because I wanted to look tough. And also because he would have needed to sign in, and I just thought he had more important urban wildlife things to do that day. The raccoons were probably up to some kind of shenanigans. 

So now there’s a giant bat box in our garage that my husband has to figure out how to hang in a tree. If I had to pick up the decomposing bats, he can do that part. Also because he’s the engineer. Despite their tragedies, the bats haven’t gone anywhere, and their turds are coming down right as rain every night. (Our recent flash flooding helps wash them away, though, so there’s the upside of flash flooding.) 

And despite their much lauded usefulness, we’re still getting mosquito bites.

UPDATE: The morning after I posted this, a fourth dead bat appeared in the driveway. It looked adolescent-age. Now I have to see if the urban wildlife biologist does house calls. 

Tornado prep: A Midwestern guide

For people not from the Midwest, tornadoes are uniquely terrifying. Don’t get me wrong, anything that unpredicatble and destructive is definitely scary, but when you grow up here, it’s just kind of a way of life. We start doing tornado drills in kindergarten or sooner: go to the lowest interior hallway, put your head between your knees and your hands over your head. (This is also a good way to squeeze out a stuck fart.) 

You do not even consider buying a home here that doesn’t have a basement. Oh, it will flood at some point. They all do. But you tolerate that inconvenience to reduce your chances of getting sucked into a giant vacuum of death. Tornado fatalities almost always originate from trailer parks, where no one has a basement. I don’t have the exact number on this, but I’m pretty sure mobile home residents comprise between 62 and 93 percent of tornado-related deaths. 

In my more than 3.5 decades in the heartland, I have never been in a tornado. For that, I am grateful. I have been very, very close, though, and this past week was one of those times. The local weather people had been warning us for a couple of days that things could get nasty. 

(Side note: The Midwest is every meteorologist’s dream location. We had one who left a local station for somewhere in the south, got bored about reporting that it was hot and humid every day and came back because weather is so much more exciting and variable here. You can talk about blizzards AND tornadoes within weeks of each other. And it seems like nothing gets TV weather people off more than chasing them there twisters.)

Anyway, so the day comes, and everyone is saying, “stay weather aware!” Which basically means don’t get so absorbed binge-watching Netflix that you don’t notice anything until your roof starts blowing off. Then evening comes. Everyone gets home from work and school, and all the local TV stations have gone wall-to-wall weather coverage. That’s when you know shit’s about to get real, if not for you, then for someone in a podunk town that is apparently 20 miles away but that you’ve never heard of. (Again, I don’t have the exact stats, but I’d say tornadoes prefer towns with populations of less than 1,000 81 percent of the time.) 

So we’re watching it, and they say one is on the ground, it’s a mile wide, and it’s heading RIGHT FOR US. At this point, I start getting texts from friends, my boss and a phone call from my mom. Every one of them wanted to ensure I was aware of the tornado’s predicted path and that everyone in my family was wearing shoes. Again, this is something you know in the Midwest: wear good shoes if the twister’s coming your way. Because you don’t want to climb out of the rubble of your house barefoot or in heels. This is why I changed out of my biz-cas work clothes and into a T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. 

You don’t want to totally dress down, though, because what if the TV reporters come by afterward to ask you what the tornado sounded like? (Hint: a train. It always sounds like a train.) I’m just kidding. They’re not going to ask someone who consciously thinks about what to wear. They will interview the woman in the trailer park in the podunk town who probably isn’t wearing a bra. 

Anyway, so we activated our tornado plan, which basically entails the following and is mostly ad hoc: 

- Literally herd cats (into the basement)

- Change everyone into sturdy clothes and shoes that are still TV-worthy

- Grab flashlights, candles, a lighter and weather radio in case the power goes out - take to basement

- Take phone chargers to basement in case power stays on but we’re trapped down there and need to call 911 and/or post our tornado pictures to social media

- Big, thick blankets to put over us in case it bears down on our house and we need to protect ourselves from flying debris

- Entertainment for children

The entertainment for the children turned out not to be enough. Fortunately, our basement is finished, which meant we kept the TV going down there. The 6-year-old kept whining, “Why are we watching the news so much?!” At least he wasn’t scared, although I kept trying to convince him he should be. I gave up and played Paw Patrol for him on my computer while I watched the red arrows aiming for our house. 

And then, as soon as the anxiety began, it was over. The tornado, which was later determined to be an EF-4 (a scale with which you are exceedingly familiar if you are a Midwesterner), lifted back up off the ground before it got to us. It later came back down about 30 miles away and spun off another twister near my parents’ house. But we were all fine. I realize I am incredibly fortunate. The people of Joplin, Mo., were not fortunate in 2011. No one around here will ever forget that one, which killed 160 people. People in Indiana and Ohio were not fortunate last week. 

But tornadoes bring out an interesting side of Midwesterners. That we are almost comfortable with them makes us feel a little badass. Oh, you have a hurricane that you know is coming a week in advance with a predictable path? That’s cute, coastal states. Sometimes we get about a minute’s worth of a siren that may or may not be audible. For some, that’s the cue to get underground. For others, it is a different kind of siren - a siren song to stand on the porch and film it. The TV meteorologists are totally going to want this footage.