Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 29th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally published on May 29, 2010 on my old blog. We were still living back east when this took place, but we would shortly be moving to San Francisco.
Batman Returns
Last fall I spent a considerable sum of money for what is known as a “bat exclusion.” A bat exclusion is a process designed to remove all bats from a property and to plug all possible entry points for future generations of bats. This process was initiated for our 110 year old Victorian-style home after we discovered a bat flying around overhead in the master bedroom. As a precautionary move, we had to undergo a series of painful rabies shots. It’s not that either of us was bitten by the bat or that the bat flying around the room had rabies. It was a just in case kind of a thing.
I also engaged Leo, aka “The Batman,” the guy who performed the bat exclusion, to install a bat condo (see the photo below) in our backyard so that the bats, in search of a place to hang out (literally) during the day, would go to the bat condo rather than seeking out the comfort of our attic.
By the way, even though Leo is often referred to locally as “The Batman” because he specializes in bat exclusions, he is nothing like any of the various actors who have portrayed Batman in the movies. He actually more closely resembles The Penguin than Batman.
So what a surprise it was the other day when my wife heard our cat running around like a mad person (or a crazed cat), making a racket in our entry foyer. She discovered that he was pawing at and playing with some kind of creature. She called out to me and, of course, I came running to see a dark brown blob on the lower landing of the stairway.
At first I thought the critter was a mouse. Then it looked almost like a frog and I wondered how a frog got into our house. But then it spread its wings and attempted to fly, not very successfully, as the cat must have inflicted some harm to its flying ability. My wife grabbed the cat and I grabbed a plastic bag into which I scooped up the wounded bat, took it outside, and dumped it on our front lawn.
What I should have done, though, was put the wounded bat in a cardboard box and taken it for testing to see if it had rabies. I don’t know if, in the processes of toying with its prey, our cat may have been bitten by the bat…or if he may have bitten the bat. And not knowing if the bat had rabies, my wife and I ended up taking the poor cat to the vet to get a rabies booster shot. He wasn’t very pleased by that experience.
The Batman is now scheduled to come back to our house on Tuesday afternoon to see if there are any new signs of bats hanging out in the attic or elsewhere in our house.
I wonder if there are bats in San Francisco.
This, That, and the Other 
Ours have never brought in a bat. We had a slow worm once, we’ve had one or two frogs (which must taste like shit, none of them ever catch a frog twice), but we get birds and rodents all the time.
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Oh, my! That is a most unfortunate tale of woe. Did you name the bat condo its Belfry?
We’ve had squirrels and raccoons in our attic and bees that were fortunately delicately removed from the brickwork on the side of our house before they’d burrowed in, which would have required major repairs.
Here’s my post from last year. which was the unanticipated fourth in a series I ran on how do we talk about race in America? The passage of time and events make this question even more heartbreakingly relevant today.
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I went to a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game and I saw a lot of bats flying around the stadium lights.
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I bought a bat house for my dad’s property in the Midwest some years ago… maybe twenty years or so. It seemed to help (with only a matter of bats flying around outside). More recently, after my dad died, my mom got squirrels in the attic. They chewed through the sheet rock in the living room! Somehow, it doesn’t seem that they ever entered the actual room. And a pest control person came and removed them from the attic.
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Thanks for sharing this flashback. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a campground in Wisconsin that had a large bat population. At dusk, thousands of them would fly out of boxes like you have pictured in this post. It was spectacular, and the campground had hardly any bugs or mosquitos.
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Bats are good at keeping the mosquitoes away.
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I hope you don’t mind one that was done the day after..
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No worries. It’s close enough! 👍
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