\nSeattle couple hosts attic full of bats<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"bats](\"http:\/\/seattletimes.com\/ABPub\/2014\/07\/11\/2024050287.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Six weeks ago, overnight, about 270 bats decided to take up residence at the Columbia City home of Brenda Matter and Bruce Crowley.<\/p>\n
Yes, it was a disconcerting sight.<\/p>\n
Every evening, 270 bats come streaming out of the attic of the two-story, century-old Victorian home so they can forage.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a warm, cozy, protected attic with just the right size gaps as entrances. A perfect bat home.<\/p>\n
Something like this had never happened in the 28 years the couple has lived there.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was,\u201d says Crowley, \u201chard to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luckily for these little creatures, Matter and Crowley didn\u2019t immediately call a pest-removal service.<\/p>\n
They could have. Bats are protected, but not when found in dwellings.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t really scared, more curious,\u201d says Crowley. \u201cGrowing up on Capitol Hill, you used to see garter snakes everywhere in gardens. We don\u2019t have poisonous snakes here, so I\u2019m not afraid of them, either.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bats for centuries have suffered from lousy public relations. A few examples:<\/p>\n
In the drawings for Dante\u2019s \u201cInferno,\u201d a gruesome Satan is shown with giant bat wings. You act unstable, and get called \u201cbatty.\u201d Even a superhero like Batman is portrayed as a moody Dark Knight. For some people, bats are filthy, bloodsucking, ugly flying vampires that carry rabies. \u201cFlying rats\u201d are what some call them.<\/p>\n
But bats are real protectors of the environment, say advocates such as Bats Northwest.<\/p>\n
The ones in the Northwest eat insects, and if not for them we\u2019d be overrun by moths, flies and mosquitoes. Plus, bat guano makes great fertilizer.<\/p>\n
Matter and Crowley are truly your prototypical nice-type Seattleites. After some research, they decided to do the right thing by the bats and made them a neighborhood attraction, putting out lawn \u201cbat-watching chairs\u201d on the sidewalk in front of their home in the 3900 block of South Ferdinand Street.<\/p>\n
On a recent night, 16 kids and adults gathered at dusk to watch the nightly bat excursion.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t IMAX-type excitement. The attic is what, 25 feet above ground, and the bats are small, each weighing a third of an ounce.<\/p>\n
The bats also don\u2019t fly out all at once, so no Alfred Hitchcock \u201cThe Birds\u201d-type visuals. Just a handful at a time.<\/p>\n
Still, nature!<\/p>\n
As Romi Silverman, 9, who lives next door, says, \u201cIt\u2019s just, like, cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the kids who sit nightly and have counted 270 bats, which takes considerably more patience than some of the adults have after standing around for 15 minutes watching the flitting creatures.<\/p>\n
Doing all this for the bats will cost Matter and Crowley at least $610, probably more, and a bunch of their time.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the nightly gatherings, and meeting all the neighborhood, the whole thing will have the sort of memory load that comes with an exotic vacation. But the costs should be only a fraction of what a vacation like that would cost,\u201d says the couple in an email.<\/p>\n
The couple have spent $260 for rabies shots. Without their health coverage, they say, the price would have been $1,500.<\/p>\n
They decided to get the series of shots when one night, a bat made a wrong turn and, instead of going outside, began flying all over the upstairs. Crowley finally caught it with a canning jar.<\/p>\n
You never know when there might be a next encounter, with maybe a scratch or bite from a scared bat, and a tiny percentage of them do carry rabies.<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s Department of Health says that fewer than 1 percent of bats have rabies, and only 5 to 10 percent of sick, injured or dead bats tested had rabies. Don\u2019t handle bats, says the agency, and the odds of contracting rabies are \u201cextremely small.\u201d<\/p>\n
The state recommends sealing up attics where bats take up residence. A contractor contacted by the couple estimated that would cost at least $350, if \u201cit\u2019s an easy job.\u201d<\/p>\n
The job entails putting screen around the attic, with the screen funneled so that once the bats leave, they can\u2019t come back in.<\/p>\n
Matter and Crowley will wait until September for that work.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because the bats right now have pups, and the pups are staying in the attic because they can\u2019t yet fly.<\/p>\n
Matter and Crowley also have crawled around the attic to cover their belongings in plastic to protect them from bat excrement. They\u2019ll also themselves be replacing the insulation, where the bats likely are nesting.<\/p>\n
Then, to give the bats a new home, Matter and Crowley are putting up a bat house \u2014 which looks like a stretched-out birdhouse \u2014 on a 12-foot pole.<\/p>\n
Michelle Noe, president of Bats Northwest, joined the crowd outside the home on that recent night.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s 32 and became a bat enthusiast while getting her degree at the University of Washington\u2019s College of Forest Resources and itemizing the species on the Olympic Peninsula.<\/p>\n
It turns out the Northwest has some 15 kinds of bats, with the most common aptly named the \u201clittle brown bat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noe guessed that\u2019s the kind that took up residence at the home of Matter and Crowley.<\/p>\n
\u201cBats have been inhabiting the night\u2019s skies for over 50\u2009million years, while the rest of us mammals have mostly stuck to the ground or trees,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
She preaches about bat myths, such as bats being vampires.<\/p>\n
Vampire bats do exist, but only in the tropics, and they make up only three of the more than 1,200 species of bats.<\/p>\n
Plus, they don\u2019t suck blood, but just make a cut with their teeth in large mammals like cattle and lap up the blood.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the nightly viewings continue at the home of Matter and Crowley.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thinking today about why we are happy about the bats,\u201d says Matter. \u201cThe bats need to go somewhere, and they think our house is a natural feature in the landscape. That feels pretty cool to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
E. Fudd<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Very cool…. From the Seattle Times: Seattle couple hosts attic full of bats Six weeks ago, overnight, about 270 bats decided to take up residence at the Columbia City home of Brenda Matter and Bruce Crowley. Yes, it was a disconcerting sight. Every evening, 270 bats come streaming out of the attic of the two-story, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,46,23,28,55,8],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bats","tag-conservation","tag-habitat-2","tag-science","tag-seattle","tag-values"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":843,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions\/843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenbelief.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}