They had a story on Channel 2 here in Salt Lake last night about West High School. It seems they are infested with bats. These are Mexican fruit bats and are migrating to Mexico. The bats like to stop over for a few days on their way to Mexico and terrorize people at West High.
I’m not sure when it first started, but after we moved into the Eyota house; we started hearing noises coming from the ceiling and the attic. At first we thought it must be mice. I went to the store and bought mouse traps and put them upstairs and in the crawl spaces in the attic. Never did catch a mouse, but continued to hear the noises. Well, one day we found out what was causing the noise when suddenly a bat was flying around in the house. Now, I’m scared of most everything, but bats particularly creep me out. They can be dangerous if they bite you. But mainly they do a lot more good than they do harm, but I didn’t care. I wanted them out of our house.
In the 18 years we lived in Eyota, we never did get them out completely. We had a home teacher for awhile named Brother Langston and he came over and sealed up every crack he could find where they might be getting in. That slowed them down, but it never did keep them out completely. We would get, on average, about one bat a year that would get into the house and I had to catch him. I guess there were times when Karen had to deal with them alone, so there were more than one a year. I’m glad Matt was there to help her because fighting the bats was a task no one wanted to do. I know you shouldn’t kill bats, but my rule was, if they got into my house, they were dead meat. I saw no point in letting them go outside just so they could come back and invade out house again. I bought a butterfly net which helped a lot to catch them.
A quick P.S. to this story was one day I went to work and was working at a temporary building just north of the IBM plant. It had two sets of double glass doors to enter the building. The double set of doors kept the cold out of the building and the heat in. I approached the outer set of doors one morning and just as I opened the door, I saw a bat flying around in the space between the doors. I couldn’t believe it. Were they following me? Obviously, I had no way to get into the building so I stood there thinking about it for a minute. Finally, I opened the outer door as far as I could and waved my hands and the bat flew out the door and on his way. Now I could go in. Someone was definitely out to get me. I was kidded about that for many months.
Dad