About mid-day Friday, I noticed Inky was glued to the stove in the living room. Staring at it. Sniffing it. Peering under it. I knew something was up; she’s a pretty good hunter and has sharp instincts. I looked inside the stove and saw what I thought was a furry little gray mouse. So I lock Inky in the bedroom and get some gloves on and get ready to grab this mouse and find him a new home. Outside of our home.
Well, I open the stove again with a flashlight and get a better look at the mouse. I notice it has leathery wings and hangs upside down from the baffle inside the stove. No, it’s not a mouse. It’s a bat. We had a bat in our house in Denver too; what is it about bats that they seem to just flock to us? Well, I didn’t feel like freeing it to fly around our house so I locked him back in, and hoped he would climb up the stovepipe and get back outside and go kill a couple thousand mosquitos or something.
Nope. He was in there all night. We could hear him scurrying around in there, trying to climb up the pipe, but he never made it out. Inky, of course, was glued to the stove all night.
Saturday morning, with the sun back up and the bat in sleepymode, we got him out. With bats (and this wasn’t my first bat, so I kinda have some experience in this) you gotta take some precautions. Most bats do not carry rabies, but some do. And their claws and teeth are so small that you may not notice if you’re bitten. And if you are bitten and they do have rabies and you don’t get it treated… well, rabies has a 100% fatality rate. So I wear gloves and a long sleeved coat and a hat and we use blankets and sheets and do everything humanly possible not to come into contact with the little guy.
He was sleepy and groggy, so I had to reach in there with a towel and get him to cling onto the towel and pull him out. He’s sleeping outside now. I hope he makes it, we got mosquitos that deserve to be eaten by a bat. With any luck he’ll wake up tonight and fly out and do his thing. Just hope he stays outside of my stove.
