Monday Mystery

You might remember this post from last year. It was a mystery---that now has been solved.

Here's the story:

All of a sudden, we see this again this year.

Some sort of droppings again! Exactly the same and in exactly the same location. 

It's too large to be mice. Like last year, I thought it could possibly be rats--which of course, really freaks me out. Then I thought maybe it's chipmunks. But why here in this exact same spot? 

Butch is much better than me at thinking outside the box. For some reason, he thought to look up. I never thought of that.

 

That's when it hit him--bats! We have bats in the belfry! Okay, we don't even have a belfry. I guess this is a vent since that's what it is. It's open to the outside. I had no idea about that. Butch said there's some sort of screen to keep anything from getting inside--except for bats!!

He went up to look in the attic. I couldn't do it--I was too afraid. Yep, bats. We have 4 attics in this house---all with vents. 

That lead to a contemplative conversation during happy hour on the front porch. How could so few bats cause so much poop. More importantly, since they hang upside down, how exactly does that work? (Sometimes our happy hour convos are a reach--after all, we're together 24/7!)

I called our exterminator who referred us to "Complete Animal Removal." Ours doesn't do bats.

They came out the very next day.

He checked all around the house and went into the attics. He told us that we have 4 bats and 6 vents. So far, the bats are only in this one vent. He also told us that he was at a house down the street last year that had hundreds of bats in their attic!! EEEK! That's probably why we got our bats for the first time--they came from that house! Luckily, ours are still outside. He told us that when the bats are expelled, they will come back somewhere else--like one of our other vents. So, we decided to have the newer screening put in all of the vents. It's an expensive proposition--nearly $2500--but I don't want to worry that the bats will just find another place to get in.

We also learned that we only have until May 1st to have the work done. Bats are protected in Tennessee. May through August--I think--is the breeding season.

I swear, it's always something. We've had a lot of animals around here in the 28 years since we moved in. A lot of the time, it's pretty exciting. We've had:

*deer

*turkeys--they were pretty cool, you could just about set your watch as to when they would come through morning and evening. They nested in the trees in our side yard--that's how we learned they can actually fly!

*groundhogs--who tore up the yard in a huge way.

*assorted small animals including chipmunks that dug up my planters on the porch.

*mice that have gotten in the house more than once.

*a cat that died under the house which we didn't even know about until a workman told us of the skeleton under there

*moles that we had to hire the "molinator" to remove

*skunks and opossums (they cohabitate) living under the house that the "Critter Ridder" took care of.

*squirrels who did damage by chewing some other kind of lead pipe vents on the house causing our roof to leak.

*assorted skinks or lizards.

*snakes

*birds, the woodpecker that pecked holes in our freshly painted columns, and who could forget the heron that ate our fish? 

*I loved the hawks we had last summer. I'm expecting them back because they tend to nest in the same area year after year. I'm thinking now that the only reason we saw them so much last summer is that the neighbor behind us took down all the trees in what was the wooded area behind us.

So there's a difference between the animals that are nuisances and the ones we love to observe. I love the wildlife around us. I just want them to behave!

Now that this mystery is solved, I wonder what will be next!