The Rear End

A Bat Story

it’s a good time of year to talk about bats. so let’s do that

Mike Paulus, illustrated by Beth Czech |

Everyone’s got a bat story. Here’s mine.

My wife Shannon and I used to live in a big old house on Lake Street in Eau Claire, right on the edge of what most of you affectionately call The Student Ghetto. The Ghetto – with all of its old houses and rickety rooftops – is pretty much infested with bats. If you’re walking around down there at dusk, just look up. Those aren’t birds.

The house we lived in was large. It was really an apartment attached to a massive, old carriage house. The place was probably crawling with all kinds of creatures, but it was never a problem until one night … one dark and stormy pleasantly balmy night.

We had just climbed into bed, and we’d been reading for a while when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye – just a dark speck, really, up in the corner of the room. At a casual glance, it seemed harmless, but I knew what it was, and I knew what was about to happen. I took a deep breath.

I calmly turned to my wife, and in a calm voice I calmly said, “Get out of the room. Now.”

Because we have such a strong, almost telepathic connection with each other, and because she hates bats, Shannon immediately knew this was code for Good god, Woman, run from the house, now! There’s a giant-ass bat perched on the ceiling it’s a-gonna swoop down like a hairy, disease-infested throwing star from hell and it’s a-gonna get tangled up in your hair and EAT! YOUR! FACE!

So she scrambled out of bed, down the hall, and down the stairs. As did I. Because I’mtotally afraid of bats, too.

Now, most men in my family would know what to do in such a situation. They would give their wife a good long kiss, peer up that stairwell with a steely gaze, and then charge up the steps to take care of that weak little S.O.B. coward of a rodent with their bare hands. Then they’d slam a Pabst Blue Ribbon and wrestle a surly 12-point buck to the ground. For dinner.

But I am not like the other men in my family. I did not grow up in the country, slaughtering animals and defending cattle from midnight wolf attacks, or whatever it is you do on a dairy farm. Instead, I grew up watching Days of Our Lives with my mom. So when confronted with a two-ounce bat hanging from the ceiling, probably sleeping, I mustered all my courage and did what any man possessing my unique talents would do.

I called my old roommate.


    My old roommate Ryan is an animal nut. He manages a Petco in central Wisconsin and used to live with all manner of reptiles, including a four-foot iguana named “Amber.” Now, I hadn’t lived with Ryan for a while, and I hadn’t even spoken to him in months. But that didn’t stop me from calling him up in the middle of the night so I could make him get out of bed and drive to our house to capture a tiny, stationary mammal. Ryan actually liked catching bats and took pride in using his bare hands, because, as Wikipedia now tells me, bats are not dirty animals and the chances of them giving you rabies are slim to none.

Unfortunately, there was no answer at his place. So I drove over there and knocked on his door. Yes, I really did that. I drove over there because I figured he was asleep and I wanted to wake him up. But there was no answer at his door. And the dreadful realization set in that I was going to have to catch this bat myself.

So we came back home and devised a plan involving rubber gloves, a plastic waste basket, oven mitts, a piece of sturdy cardboard, and I believe a protective hat of some sort. First, we went outside to look into our second-story bedroom window and check to see if the bad had moved. It hadn’t. Then we crept upstairs and slowly opened the bedroom door. The bat was still there, up in the corner. It was wriggling. It knew a plan was afoot. It could smell the plot against it.

After a few false starts involving much cringing and quiet gasping, we sneaked up on the bat and captured it in the waste basket, using the cardboard as a lid. It flopped around in there like a horrific little beast, yearning to escape and rip holes in our faces to make a nest or something. But we got it outside and set it free.

Yep, after about two hours of plotting and bellyaching, it took less than two minutes to get the bat out of our house. But I think we learned a lot from the ordeal – we learned a lot about ourselves and about our place in the animal kingdom.

This all happened about eight years ago. I’m fairly confident that, if faced with a similar situation today, I’d know what to do. And I’d behave less like a five year-old while doing it.

Maybe.