Going bats

BY JACK SLAY JR.

I had lived a simple life, free of complaint and fear—until they came swooping into my world.

The first incident occurred several years ago. My oldest son Kirk and I were sitting in the living room of our LaGrange home. From nowhere appeared what I assumed was a lost and confused bird. I grabbed a broom, and the creature—leathery, fanged and straight from the dungeons of a Roger Corman film—suddenly dove straight for my face. I shrieked like a 90-year-old woman and threw myself behind the couch, the broom forgotten and visions of rabies dancing in my head. The bat (and it was indeed a bat) returned to its panicked circling. Kirk announced, “Looks like we got us a bat, Dad.”

I agreed and remembered a movie about a man who’s bitten by something rabid and ties himself up in his barn to protect his family. I have a garage, I thought, but not a barn.

When I peered over the couch, all was quiet. “Where’s the bat?” “Flew into the wall,” Kirk said, pointing. Apparently my shrieking had interfered with its sonar. The bat lay in the middle of the foyer floor, now looking more like a mouse than a vampire.

I scooped it up in a towel and tossed it outside, my house now varmint-free and my dignity intact.

Or so I thought. Flash forward to a few months ago.

This time, I am awakened by my wife’s insistent elbow. “What’s that?” she hisses. “What’s what?” “That noise, that sound—like a serial killer trying to keep quiet.” 

I come slowly awake, a persistent flutter drilling into my dissipating dreams. The moon filters into the room and I discover by its light another bird winging about our room.

It registers deep inside what this creature is before my still-awakening brain does. I sit up, and once again find myself face to face with a swooping, probably rabid bat, this one surely as big as a crow, eagle or pterodactyl.

One more time I’m shrieking and diving for cover, this time, quite literally, under the covers.

Again, my high-pitched shrieking wrecks the bat’s sonar (its “echolocation” someone has since informed me) and sends it crashing into the wall. On our dresser, inert as a dirty sock, it looks not much bigger than a cockroach. I use another towel and again toss a bat outside.

I’ve now learned that my interlopers were evening bats, common to Georgia, a species that favors the attics and the walls of old houses. A local bat expert says they are perfectly harmless, but I only halfway believe him. I’m calling an exterminator next week. Then, I’m going to start building that barn.

—Jack Slay Jr. is dean of students at LaGrange College.

Bats and rabies: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, bats infected with the rabies virus can cause rabies in humans. For more on rabies prevention, visit www.cdc.gov.