The Return of the Bats: Bat-tle Royale continues

THE FIP-FIP-FIP OF BATWINGS

source: Cdn Museum of Nature

 We really had hoped that the bats were gone after that miserable night of chasing them around the house and attempting to bat (ha) them out the window. For those of you with bat encounters of your own, however, you probably know what happened next.

Around dusk the following night, we returned home after visiting my parents, and heard the ominous fip-fip-fip of a pair of leathery batwings. Sure enough, one of the flying rats was still inside our house, flying around the living room. Brian seemed hellbent on dealing with this problem once and for all. He pulled he screen out of the window and gave it to me to use as a barricade so the bat couldn't escape the living room. I then watched him crouch on the floor with a squash racquet in his hand, which he began waving at the bat every time its panicked flight took it further away from the wide-open window. For what felt like a lifetime, Brian huddled by the sofa and waved his racquet menacingly at the bat, until finally...it disappeared. A twenty minute search of every nook and cranny--examined by pulling apart my entire living room--resulted in Brian finding the creature inside the handmade birdhouse his uncle had made as a wedding gift. If that image isn't sufficiently Bugs Bunny enough for you, imagine what it looked like when the bat flew out of its hiding place and took Brian on a merry chase around the room where, by leaping after the bat, Brian succeeded in breaking a leg off the sofa and knocking a painting off the wall.

Eventually the bat landed, exhausted, on my shelf of knicknacks. Brian ran upstairs to get a shoebox, and I watched the beast crawl on its weird wing-arms over top of my Red Rose tea figurines and my rock collection. The window screen slid in my sweaty hands, and when I went to adjust it, I knocked something off the wall by my hand. Hopped up on adrenaline, I managed to catch the thing: turns out, it was the big black crucifix my friend had brought me back from Ireland. I stood there with my mesh shield and my giant crucifix clutched in my hand like this five-inch-long bat was a vampire I was warding off.

Brian eventually managed to scrape the bat off the shelf and into a shoebox, which he then shook out into the night air. I told him I would have thrown the whole damn shoebox right out the window, but a half-hour later, when Bat Two made a reappearance, I was glad he still had it. In the dining room this time, Brian crouched on the floor near the window, waiting for his chance to pounce. The bat sensed his presence near the window, though, so it kept bombing the window screen I was holding, latching onto it, and trying to find a way through, ostensibly to eat out my eyeballs. My hooting Beaker-from-the-Muppets scream punctuated the night as the creature battered itself against my barricade. 

Artists' conception. Sorta. The teeth
aren't big enough.

Brian eventually caught the monster and threw it out the window to join its ugly friend. The bat specialists who arrived the next day (as well as the public health nurse we talked to about rabies) both called Brian a modern-day hero. I do, too, though I have a small bone to pick with him. You see, when Brian caught Bat One in the shoebox, the flying monkey was really peeved off. It started making angry bat-swearing sounds, which sound a bit like tiny rusty gears being turned. After the furor died down with Bat Two, I turned to Brian and asked him if he recognized the angry bat sound we'd heard, and he said no...until I reminded him that four days earlier, we had heard the sound in our bedroom, and Brian had said it was a cricket. You see, this means that the bats were in our room for four whole days. 

I'm glad they're gone, and that the pros came to seal up the holes in the roof. But I've memorrized that creaking angry bat sound, and if I ever hear it again, I'm throwing a towel over my hair and heading straight to Mom and Dad's. Cricket, my arse.