Baby bats are flying into people's houses because its that time of year. Don't freak out – do this instead

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Just the sight of bats makes some people freak out.

Lynn Braband has seen it firsthand.

During the 1980s and ’90s, he had his own bat-removal business and responded to calls from people panicked about bats getting into their homes – something that happens from mid-July to late August, when juvenile bats, born in the spring and learning to fly, wind up in places where they shouldn’t be.

“I remember once, this huge guy with great big muscles kind of cowering in the corner,” says Braband, a senior educator at the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University. The winged mammals “have a lot of baggage associated with them.”

For examples of this, see every vampire movie ever made.

In real life, “a healthy bat won’t come after you or attack you or fly in your hair,” he says.

Bats have an important purpose. They eat bugs – lots of them. A colony of 100 little brown bats, the most abundant bat species in New York state, “may consume hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes and other small insects each summer,” according to the Wildlife Damage Management Program of the Cornell Cooperative Extension.

Less than 1% of bats that are captured and turned over to the state for study are found to be rabid, "but it’s an extremely serious disease,” Braband says.

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Give it an opening

What should you do if you’re hanging out in your living room watching TV and suddenly – oh my gosh! – a bat is circling above you?

“The first thing is, remain calm,” says Phil West, who owns West Wildlife, a Conesus-based wildlife removal company serving Monroe, Ontario and Livingston Counties. “If you start screaming and running around, it’s going to make the situation much more frantic and harder for everyone.”

To reduce your chances of coming into contact with the bat, carefully position yourself close to a wall; a bat's flight pattern is such that it tends to go higher near walls and lower toward a room’s center.

Leave the lights on or turn them on, so you can see the bat, and don’t take your eyes off it, “because they can disappear” in your house, Braband says.

If you can open a window or door without losing sight of the bat, go for it. The bat wants to leave as much as you want it to.

Don’t chase the bat or swing at it with a tennis racket or a broom, the Cooperative Extension says. That will only cause the animal to panic “and fly erratically around the room.” If you hit it, you could crush it, Braband says, and to be tested for rabies, bats need to be intact.

If it lands instead of leaves

After a period of circling, if a bat doesn’t leave your house, it probably will land on something off the floor, such as a wall or curtains.

If you’re comfortable trying to catch it yourself, after putting on heavy gloves, take a jar, coffee can or similar container and carefully place it over the bat, Braband says. Then slide a piece of cardboard underneath the container to secure it. In this situation, you’d need help because one person wouldn’t be able to keep tabs on the bat and fetch those items.

If you’re certain that no person or pet in your home has had contact with the bat, you can release it outside. Note that bats can’t take off from the ground like birds, so don’t just dump it on the ground. Instead, tilting the container away from you, allow the bat to climb a vertical surface such as a tree away from your house, wildlifecenter.org advises.

If you’re worried the bat made contact with someone in your home, you should probably call the health department,  so the animal can be tested for rabies, which requires euthanizing it. Contact includes a bite, an impact or waking up in a room with a bat in it, says Monroe County Health Department spokesman Ryan Horey. (P.S. This is why it's important to vaccinate all your pets, even indoor pets, against rabies.)  

If you’re not a DIYer

If there’s a bat in your home and you’re not comfortable trying to catch it yourself, you’ll still need to keep your eyes on it.

Reaching out to your animal control office for help (which seems like a logical thing to do) might not illicit an immediate response. We called several during regular business hours and in most cases were sent straight to voicemail, and our messages were not returned.

Although it facilitates rabies testing, the county health department does not do bat removal, Horey says. For that, he and Braband recommend calling a private contractor such as West, who is licensed by the state to deal with nuisance wildlife.

Bat removal costs vary but generally will run you several hundred dollars, West says. “If you’re waking someone up out of bed," he says, "it’s going to cost more than it would during the daytime.”

If there is a rabies concern, a private contractor will work with the health department directly.

If the bat comes back

If you or someone else removes a bat from your home and the problem repeats, you may want to call a nuisance wildlife expert about bat-proofing your place.

Bats can crunch up their bodies and get into homes from the outside through openings as small as a quarter-inch and from attic crawl spaces into living areas the same way. Experts know where to look for breaches (which tend to be more numerous in older homes) and how to seal them.

They can set up temporary one-way doors that allow bats to exit a house but prevent them from reentering it. Those doors should not be installed until late August, Braband says, because they could cause baby bats, dependent on their mothers, to become trapped in your home and die there.

Bat-proofing costs range from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand, West says, depending on a home’s size and the complexity of its architecture. A small, simple ranch is much cheaper to bat-proof than a complicated McMansion, for instance.

A few other things

No chemicals or pesticides are registered to rid homes of bats, the Cooperative Extension says, and the “unnecessary killing of bats is not an environmentally sound, humane or permanent solution.”

The agency says there is no research to prove that widely sold bat-repelling electromagnetic or ultrasonic sound devices actually work.

Bat boxes provide alternative roosting sites for bats. Putting one near a home with a bat problem, without sealing up the home, isn't likely to succeed, Braband says.