Bat Hunting and Coffin Hop

Have you ever seen a bat in your house? What better time than Halloween to discuss bat hunting. Ok so its not as glamorous as being a vampire hunter like Buffy but there are a lot similarities. At times, it can be just as unnerving. It also takes bravery to hunt bats. And weapons.

My home was built in 1913 and when I moved into a few years ago, we had a bat problem. This was not disclosed by the previous owners. I think that little morsel of knowledge should be shared at the negation table.
So we woke one night to the swooshing sound in our bedroom. My wife turned on the lamp on the nightstand and a little fluttering bat was doing laps around our bedroom. We both screamed (ok I admit that I wasn’t a mighty bat hunter, at first). I screamed like a little girl. She bolted from the room. My heart was pounding and I was hyperventilating but I low crawled out of the bedroom, sprinted down the steps and found a broom (A handy bat hunter weapon? No. Brooms are poor choice, a rookie move). I ran back to the bedroom, squatting at the foot of the bed, blindly swinging the long broom.
I kept missing the bat. It kept doing laps and occasionally screeching at me. I smacked the globe on the ceiling fan. It exploded onto the bedding in a million tiny shards. At three AM. I finally got the bat. That was a big mess to clean up. Not the bat. The glass.

Thus began a campaign to seal up my home and keep the bats out.

Patching holes, fixing gutters. Covering vents with mesh. Filling cracks with that foam stuff.

I would find places that I figured were how they were getting in and seal it up only to find a bat hanging from our mantle or suddenly appear in the living room doing laps. Their little faces look like miniature people.

The ideal weapons for hunting bats are a racquetball racket and a shoebox. If we get attacked, I announce we are on red alert, go get my weapons and track the bat until it picks a place to hang from. Then I place the shoebox under the bat and gently tap it with the racket. They drop in and I shut it. No big deal.

The bats scream in protest but they usually survive the ordeal. After all, bats are a protected species and they chow down on millions of bugs.

It took over a year of hard work but we only saw one bat this year.

That is how I became Erik the Bat Hunter. I have lots of bat stories.

Don’t forget to check out my Coffin Hope blog post from the other day and enter to win one of my ebooks!! All you have to do is tell me about your favorite Halloween costume…alternatively you could tell me about your own harrowing bat-hunting tale! Either way, keep clicking on the Coffin Hop!