Sonar shrieks: When bats attack

Part I

Shawn comes home from studying — it’s around 9:30pm. Tired and sweaty from his bike ride, Shawn is ready for a shower and some stir-fry.

When he first walks past his bathroom sink he sees what he thinks is a frog — small, shiny, pulsating. When he looks closer, however, he sees that it’s not an amphibian, but a flying rodent: a bat. You don’t expect a bat in your sink.

Really, you don’t think of a bat as a thing that’s ever close to you. Bats flit around in the twilight, surfing between shadow and silhouette. But when you see one in your bathroom sink under those bright lights — its thin-skinned wings partially splayed, the erect radar ears, its scooped-out, beady eyes — all you can think about is how quickly it breathes. That’s what Shawn notices first: the breathing.

Shawn paces around — leaves the room and comes back in, looks at the bat. Eventually he calls his father, an engineer quick with a Texas style solution to the problem.

Work gloves and a pillowcase.

Shawn isn’t too keen on the pillowcase idea — he doesn’t want to have to grab the bat and then put it in the pillowcase — which he’d have to do owing to the shape of the sink: He’s not sure if the bat is going to panic and attempt to fly, scratch, bite. So he opts, instead, for work gloves and a beach towel.

He sneaks up on the bat, positive it will panic. He quickly spreads the towel taut over the mouth of the sink to prevent the bat from flying. Then he moves both of his gloved hands on top of the towel into the center of the sink and scoops the bat up. But the bat is tiny and soft, and halfway to the front door Shawn isn’t sure if he has the bat at all. It could just be a fistful of towel. So he peeks inside. The bat is there.

Shawn’s apartment complex, located very close to the Congress Avenue Bridge (where six million bats roost), is square and situated around an atrium. Shawn lives on the second floor. So he walks to the rail of the second-story balcony and pops the towel open, expecting the bat to immediately fly off. But no bat. Then he pops the towel again — with force. Still no bat. Shawn peeks around the towel: The bat clings to the towel — upside-down. So he shakes it, and the bat rolls down the face of the towel, in a remarkably controlled fashion, and onto the ground. Then it begins this horrifying crawl. It stretches its wings totally out a couple of times and then begins dragging itself to the side of the balcony. Shawn takes a few steps back though he’s confident the bat won’t freak out. If the bat had wanted to freak out it’d have done so long ago, he reasons.

When it reaches the edge, the bat rolls off the balcony and drops. Shawn runs to the railing and looks down; the bat flies straight up, past his face, circles the atrium once and flies out over the roof into the night sky.

Shawn goes inside and makes himself a stiff drink and walks back to the bathroom to throw everything away.

As Shawn glugs bleach down his sink, he decides what had happened was kind of fun. Scary at first, but overall an interesting experience. But of course he would — that was only the first bat.

Parts II / III

Shawn sets his alarm for 7am. He has to be at the hospital at 8am to get a TB test so he can start volunteering at the Children’s Hospital the following week. So when he wakes at fifteen minutes to 7am, he thinks it’s odd, as he almost never wakes so early. Then he hears a crazed fluttering and something knocking against the ceiling. He jumps up out of the bed and walks over to the large glass sliding door that covers the eastern wall of his bedroom. Vertical blinds shade the door, but Shawn always leaves them open to encourage him to wake in the mornings. The sun is just starting to come up. He thinks the bat has come back to try to sleep at his apartment and is trying to get in somehow. So he peers through the window, looking on to his balcony. Then he hears something above his head and to his right.

He sees that another bat has clawed onto one of the open blinds. But the plastic is too slick and the bat slowly, slowly slides down to the floor where it falls face down on the carpet — still. Shawn feels calm. He’s pretty sure the bat won’t panic, just like the last one. Shawn throws on some clothes and walks to the front door where he tossed the gloves and the towel the night before. He’s had some practice and the extraction is quick. He walks to the bat, scoops it up, and takes it out the front. Unlike the last bat, this one flies off immediately when he pops the towel.

There’s the possibility it could be the same bat, and Shawn regrets not somehow tagging the original one.

In the office where Shawn is about to receive his TB test there are two computers — one is empty and the other is occupied by a woman. Between the computers there are pictures of this owl thumbtacked to the wall. “You have an owl living at your house?” Shawn asks the woman, hoping that he might be able to segue into the fact that he has bats living at his apartment.

“No, that owl lives at my co-worker’s house.”

“Oh.”

The TB test takes no time at all and he’s back at his apartment around 9:30am. He’s determined to talk to the apartment management about the problem. But since the office doesn’t open until 10am, he decides to go clean his apartment. So he puts his dishes in the dishwasher, piles his clothes into trash bags (to make sure no bats get into them), and vacuums the floor. Once he’s finished cleaning, Shawn takes a seat on the couch. The brick wall opposite the couch is populated by his stereo, desk, and a few pieces of art. But up and to the left Shawn sees a dark spot: Bat number three hanging upside-down on the brick.

At this point bats are no longer scary. They are still disgusting and creepy and upside-down, but the shock element has waned. Shawn is confident the bat will not attack. He has learned that bats can’t spontaneously take flight — they have to start from a glide before they can begin actually flying. Nevertheless he wants it out. So he’s going to extract it and go tell the office people, “Three bats in 12 hours — something is not right here. This is not a fluke.”

This time he pops the towel and this bat flies downward into the atrium directly down to a dark place under the stairs on the first level, where it clings to the brick about four inches from the ground. The bat can’t deal with the daylight. Shawn goes to look at the bat — he studies it a while as it sleeps. After a time Shawn’s convinced the bat will sleep there all day, and he goes to the apartment office.

He hasn’t really thought much about rabies at this point.

At the office there’s a sign on the door explaining that the office is closed for Good Friday. But Shawn is determined to take some kind of action. First he takes all his clothes and important things and piles them into his car. He won’t be staying in his apartment this evening (or for the five nights after).

While he’s on the phone with Animal Control in the parking lot of his apartment complex, he finally sees the hole in the roof.

Lessons

Up to this point Shawn has done everything wrong. That’s the first thing he learns from Animal Control.

“Well, sir, we’ll send someone out to extract the bat and then we’ll test them for rabies. If they’re negative, then you’re fine. Otherwise you’ll have to go to the hospital for some shots.”

“You don’t understand,” Shawn tells them, “There are no bats that I can point to. I have extracted the bats. I got them out of the apartment myself.”

“What do you mean you extracted the bats yourself?”

“I got rid of them.”

“I’m going to have to talk to someone else — can you hold?” After a moment she comes back on the line and tells Shawn that he will be contacted by Mary, a nurse with Travis County Public Health Response, Epidemiology and Surveillance.

When Mary calls Shawn back he’s in the middle of trying to turn some change into dollar bills at the HEB — since he’s broke and won’t be staying at his place, he needs some cash. So he’s screwing around with the CoinStar while people line up behind him, answering all these questions into his cell phone about rabies exposure. The situation becomes so complicated that he gets a number from her and calls her after his CoinStar transaction is complete.

Out in the parking lot Shawn calls Mary back. He tells her the whole story.

Here’s what he learns from Mary, and the overall experience:

If you see a bat in your house or on the ground, call Animal Control immediately. Dial 311 and they can direct your call as well as put you in contact with the appropriate medical professional. They will come get the bat and have it tested for various diseases. If you come in to contact with a bat — even if you are on the Hike and Bike trail and one brushes against you — go get rabies shots. If you don’t know if you came into contact with a bat, but could have — go get rabies shots.

It is not true that rabies vaccination consists of shots injected into your stomach. That used to be the case, but now it’s a series of shots in the shoulders and hips. It is still fairly painful, however.

Bats have extremely fine teeth. Many people who have been bitten by a bat have no idea anything has happened. If a bat bites you in your sleep there is no way you’d be able to identify a bite mark in the morning. Since Shawn woke up in the same room with a bat he had to go get shots. Furthermore, rabies is spread through saliva — usually a bite, but not always. If you handled a dead bat and got the wet saliva on your hand and then rubbed your eye — you could get rabies. The scariest thing about rabies is that an infected person will not exhibit any symptoms for up to a couple of weeks. Once the symptoms appear they resemble those associated with cold or flu and so are not easily identified as rabies. But once you start exhibiting symptoms, that means the virus has infected your brain and you are going to die.

It’s not the people who are confronted with an obviously rabid dog, bitten, and rushed to the hospital who die of rabies. The person who dies of rabies wakes up in a hotel room with a bat in his room, gathers his belongings, checks out, and leaves believing he never came into contact with the bat — and so doesn’t seek treatment. So it’s best to just get the shots if you think there is any possible way you could have come in contact with rabies or an animal that could be carrying rabies. If you are uninsured the shots will run you about $248. You will be given a series of shots. The number of shots you will initially be administered depends on your body weight. Shawn weighs around 160 pounds and needs four shots initially. He will then be administered four shots over the course of a month — three, seven, 14, and 28 days after the initial shots. Some people experience a mild fever or allergic reaction but nothing too serious. Rabies shots are administered often in Austin — Shawn wasn’t the only person waiting around to get rabies shots.

All in all Shawn is out of his apartment for six days. Two on friends’ couches — four in cheap motels, which his apartment complex pays for. During his displacement Shawn has to stop by his apartment to grab this or that and discovers two more bats — one in the sink again and another on the couch. This time Shawn does the right thing and calls Animal Control. A short round man with a square, bald head as thick as his hammy neck comes to extract the rodents.

“You got a cup or a bag or sumthin?” he asks Shawn.

After collecting the bats in a Ziploc bag, the man throws them, rather carelessly, in a side compartment of his truck. The bats are tested and a few days later the results come back negative for rabies.

In the end Shawn has three possible decisions: Have people scour his apartment and clean the carpet; move into another apartment in the complex; or lawfully break his lease and move somewhere else. The apartment puts a screen over the rotting hole as a temporary solution. Since Shawn only has three more months in his apartment, he goes with the first choice.

But the bats are a recurring component in Shawn’s dreams now — he is haunted by dark splotches on brick walls. He imagines tourists with glowsticks, eating ice cream and hanging over the rail of the Congress Avenue Bridge, yearning for an inky cloud of rabies to engulf them.