Bats in my belfry

  I used to have bats in my belfry.

  Ok, so I don't really have a belfry. In my attic, though. And they got into the house from there pretty frequently.
  I remember the first time it happened. My wife and I were sound asleep one sultry July night when we were jolted awake by our cat doing the Daytona 500 on our bed. After about 7 circuits she left the bed and careened down the hall into the living room. We could hear her bouncing off various pieces of furniture. This definitely fell into the category of What The Hell?
  Stumbling down the hall and flicking a light switch revealed two small bats fluttering around our living room in that remarkably unbirdlike way of flying bats have. A peeping tom, had one been peeping, would have got quite a kick out of watching us, myself with a tennis racquet, my wife with a broom, trying to herd these little creatures towards a propped open front door. It was a good twenty minutes before we could manage to get both of them to escape into the night. A bizarre experience, to be sure.
  The next day we told our neighbour about it, and he informed us that it was not the first time it had happened. The previous occupants of our house had experienced the same nightly visitations on occasion. How they got in was a complete mystery to me. We were worried about it for some time, but the event did not reoccur and we eventually stopped thinking about it.
  Fast forward approximately one year to another late July evening. The wife and I were sitting in the living room enjoying a movie: Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I kid you not. We had just got to the scary part, if that movie can be said to have a scary part, when I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. You guessed it. Two more bats flying around in our living room. We were suitably freaked out. The same broom and racquet dance ensued until we could return to the conclusion of our movie bat free.
  This time around we were renovating our kitchen. We assumed the bats had somehow got into our attic, and come out through the rather largish gaps between the walls and ceiling. Again, it was a one-off incident,and the kitchen was finished in short order to prevent a recurrence.
  You know what's coming, don't you?
  Again, it is one year later, and this time we have a four month old baby sleeping upstairs. Again, it is late on a July evening. Again, we discover that we have bats flying around in our house. One flies up the hallway and into our son's bedroom. Obviously, this is a situation we are no longer able to ignore. We have to call the bat man.
  We said that facetiously, but upon doing some research, we find that there is only one person we can call; and they call him the bat man. You see, bats are protected species. They are not endangered, but due to man's rapid development of our natural areas, they are certainly threatened. And we want bats around. Lots of bats. They eat literally thousands of mosquitos a night. Pest control agencies must be specially licensed to deal with bats, and under no circumstances are they allowed to chemically exterminate the animals.
  The only way to get rid of bats in your home is to do what is called an exclusion. And the only person in the Greater Toronto Area, at the time, who could do a bat exclusion was Charles Robertson. Charles was a research assistant at the University of Toronto, and worked with the Ontario Conservation Authority. He was one of the foremost authorities on bats in Canada, and had worked with them around the world. He even kept one as a pet; one of the big ones they call flying foxes. And everyone who knew him, everyone, called him The Bat Man.



Stay tuned for the next installment: The Exclusion.