Bats. Funnily enough they were not creatures I had ever given much thought to as a city dweller. But they’ve been a feature of my life ever since I moved to the country twenty years ago.
We have had our adventures, the bats and I, as they sometimes found their way inadvertently into my house. Hanging on the bathroom curtains, lurking under my bed or flitting silently around the sitting room. Every visit has caused mild panic in me. I do realise they are harmless creatures and I have always done my best to evict or remove them without injury to either them or myself.
But now my two lunatic young cats have added a new dimension of bat warfare to life.
For the last while I’ve noticed that the cats have taken to thundering around the roof of my house at dusk. It’s a single storey cottage type and they leap up on to the oil boiler which is adjacent to the lowest point of the roof. It is only a couple of feet – nothing to these agile young cats – from there up to the roof.
The first thing that alerts us – myself and my wee doggie Pippin – is the thud of them lepping onto the boiler. Pippin makes a rush for the sofa next to the window giving of her best imitation of a Doberman or German Shepherd right beside my ear. Of course by that stage the intrepid pair – Seamus and Dusty – are nowhere in sight, so after some more warning barks, Pippin resumes her dozing on the sofa beside the fire.
Shortly after they find their way onto the roof there are intermitted bouts of what sounds like a herd of elephants running across the roof of the kitchen. Needless to say Pippin is yet again quite perturbed by this unexplained and unseen sound of galloping intruders. Her ears perk up, she rises from her prone position and glares at me as if to enquire what am I going to do to sort things out.
At first I thought they were just larking about, exploring new territory, indulging their curiosity as cats are wont to do. I did think however that it seemed a strange place to be running around at night when there were acres of fields and hedgerows to explore.
But the other evening I found out what they were at. Chasing, and I am sorry to say, catching bats. How they do it I do not know. There is a pitched roof on the house, so no flat surface from which to pounce and surely the bats have enough sense not to be sitting around on top of the roof. But catch them they do.
I saw it with my own eyes in the deep dusk the other evening. I thought it was a mouse that Dusty was ‘playing’ with in that awful way that cats do. As I watched mesmerised out the window however I realised that, since mice do not fly, it must be a bat. Uuurgh!
I banged on the window to distract the cat and indeed she did look my way and the bat took its chance and flitted off into the hedge. But alas next morning on the door mat was a dead bat – either that one did not effect a successful escape, or another one took its place. Either way, the bat population around here was reduced by at least one.
What to do about it I’m not quite sure. I cannot move the boiler. I can’t visualise what kind of barrier would prevent the cats accessing the roof. I suppose all that I can hope for is that the bats learn by experience to avoid swooping low enough at that point to evade capture.
In the meantime I’ll just turn up the TV and myself and Pippin will try to ignore the mayhem all around us!
Embracing turbulence 