Friday night we were watching “Hook” on dvd from Netflix and consuming enormous quantities of popcorn, when suddenly there was an exclamation from Steve’s end of the couch (he’s been coming over for family movie night the past couple of weeks). “Whoa — a bat just flew in!”
I paused the movie. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Neither did I,” said Elizabeth. Luke said he hadn’t either.
“It flew in the window,” Steve insisted. “I think it flew down the hall!”
So we briefly searched the back of the house for a bat, found nothing, and finally decided that Steve had seen a moth or something.
This morning Elizabeth was taking her bath and noticed something clinging to the wall mouldiing above the tub.
Poor little guy must have been starving after two days and three nights in the house.
After some discussion we decided to wait until dusk to release him outside, so he wouldn’t be disoriented and helpless in the bright light of day. When Steve came over to see the kids this afternoon he got elected, by virtue of being the only one tall enough to reach, to capture little Batdude in a towel.
I love bats, I truly do. Bats Are Our Friends. But little Batdude was seriously pissed off by the whole experience, and he was making some remarkably unattractive faces at us involving lots and lots of teeth, and he didn’t seem terribly receptive to our apologies, so we just took him out on the porch and let him go without further ado.
He exploded out of the towel and into the twilight sky with reassuring vigor — at least he wasn’t too weak from his ordeal to hunt.
I bet he won’t be flying into any more windows anytime soon, though. At least he’ll have a story to tell his grandkids. “So there I was…clinging to a barren wall in enemy territory for days on end….”
An Invincible Summer 