Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Holy Scats, Batman!

I was tickled pink last night when we left work to find a small pile of scats out front.



To the unknowing, these might look like mouse scats. In fact, to the knowing they look like mouse scats, but the are, in fact, bat scats.




This means our bats are back. Most likely, we have big browns (Eptesicus fuscus), which have always been a very common house bat, but with white-nose syndrome taking its toll on little browns (Myotis lucifugus), the odds of these being LBB droppings is now pretty slim.

A couple years ago I rescued a baby bat that had fallen from its maternity roost out front. With the help of our maintenance man, I scaled a ladder and put the little fellow back up by the roost entrance so it could return to safety and its mother.




If you want to read more about the rescue of this bat, visit my post at here.

2 comments:

  1. I found your blog while looking around at what others are doing. I enjoyed your pics and decided to follow you. Bats kind of freak me out though,, my younger brother was scratched by one while we were fishing when we were about 10. Poor kid, he had to get rabies shots.

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  2. HI, Melissa, and welcome! After reading your comment, I have to wonder how one gets scratched by a bat while out fishing! As for me, well, I just love bats. I've had rabies shots, too, but they've advanced a whole lot in recent years. Instead of a long series of painful shots in the belly, it's now about three shots in the arm. As a society, we tend to over-react when it comes to bats and rabies (you are more likely to get food poisoning at a church picnic than rabies from a bat), but it is always better to err on the side of caution.

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