Whimper
When I reeled downstairs this morning to make my Sunday morning extra-super-strength BLACK BLACK BLACKER THAN THAT tea, which is the crucially necessary rocket fuel for service ring*, I was just about awake enough to notice . . . ahem . . . there seemed to be more dust on the kitchen countertops than usual. Not a light, tactful layer such as might accumulate on the Aga overnight** but great fat gobbets of the stuff, like the early stages of a planet coalescing out of the atomic murk.*** NO NO NO I thought, I AM NOT THINKING ABOUT THIS. Tea and bell ringing is enough for early Sunday morning. I am NOT THINKING about how these hairy rolls of dust remind me of what might be the result of some light wing sweeping across the tops of my cupboards†. . . .
Furthermore I have CLOSED the hatch door into the attic . . . I do not want to think that there may be other exits.††
I was, however, not terribly surprised when I got back from the florist’s after ringing and picked up my flower bucket†††, which lives beside the kitchen sink . . . and discovered a bat in the bottom of it. Oh expletive, I said, aggrievedly, and tipped her outdoors under the triffid.‡ I then decided to finish the dusting job she’d started‡‡, and while I was up there—remember the cottage has tall walls: I can stand on the Aga and still have head clearance—had a wary look around. The corners all look pretty solid, but . . . there’s a whacking great beam that runs the width of the cottage ceiling. And behind it, tucked cosily into the ceiling, is a massive great open gutter chopped out for the wiring. Which seems to disappear into the walls at both ends.
If my bats are cruising through the wiring channels in this little old house . . . I am so frelled. I am sooooo frelled.
Meanwhile, after several people posted/emailed/tweeted about dealing with bats and Blocking Visible Holes I decided I wasn’t going to try to do the job myself with duct tape—I was going to hire Atlas to do it. Among other things he’s going to know which gaping service holes you can afford to squirt expanding foam into, and which will make the house explode if you try.
But I admit my hysteria level is rising somewhat. I was in the attic this afternoon, beating back the encroaching tides of stuff§ so Atlas would have room for whatever sorcery he was going to have to employ. I had closed the hatch and cracked the window two nights ago . . . and while the floor hasn’t been exactly pristine in a while§§ there is clearly something going on up there that wasn’t going on a week ago. And ‘block visible holes’? The round plumbing pipes all plunge into large, roughly hacked out square holes. And the plasterboard that serves as a ceiling appears to have been odd bits rescued from a tip, and none of them fit against any of the others.
I’m telling myself that if you’re going to have a wildlife invasion, pipistrelles are probably about as good as it gets. They’re tiny, in a country that has about one case of rabies in a decade they’re harmless, they don’t eat your wiring or chew your woodwork, and their crap is dry and crumbly. They may even eat your clothes moths.
But I had four hundred and ten bats in my roof the end of last season. My modest little cottage contains the largest bat nursery in Hampshire, according to the local Bat Squad, who counted them.§§§ And this is the time of year that the mums are setting up this year’s nursery.
And they’re protected. It’s illegal to disturb them.
Yeeep. Yeeeeeeeeeep.#
* * *
* Bell? Rope? Wha’? What time is it?
** Yes, I’m an appalling housekeeper. Although I don’t mind housework itself all that much, I mind the time it takes a lot. And if I have a tidying impulse I tend to spend it on the garden, which is a lot more interesting. Things happen in a garden.^ But very slightly in my defense allow me to say that the Aga’s chief fault is that she is a dust factory. She has many virtues and I wouldn’t want to be without her . . . but she creates dust the way humans create carbon dioxide: by breathing.^^ You really do have to give her a quick mop off every day, unless you fancy being able to see that you didn’t by the dust-ring your tea mug makes. Any pot, pan, vase, mug, or general surface area you haven’t used in over a week . . . well.
^ Although things happen indoors too. Especially lately. I suspect the suicidal leap one of my geraniums took off its windowsill yesterday had some help. SIIIIGH.
^^ Hellhounds create hair similarly. If you watch them closely as they sleep, you can see the tiny hair-launches with every outbreath.
*** My kitchen, the laboratory.
† And who leaves open cupboard tops in a kitchen with an Aga in it, for pity’s sake? My predecessor could have run them up to the ceiling and put doors on them. If I ever pay off Third House I’m going to replace both the cupboards and the countertops at the cottage. If you would be so kind as to direct your closest three million friends to buy my books.
†† I urgently don’t want to think the exit(s) is in the attic, but I’ll get to that (again) in a minute.
††† You know you’re supposed to cut the stems again and then let them soak in water up to their necks? This is worth the trouble. The florist loads me down with the end-of-week stuff she can’t sell, and a surprising amount of it lasts a surprisingly long time if treated seriously.
‡ This one was lively for midmorning. Not so lively that I was worried about her getting out of the flower bucket—I don’t think she could: it was too narrow to spread her wings^—but definitely taking an interest in her unprepossessing surroundings. When I dropped her under the honeysuckle she walked promptly over to a stem and began climbing. I have always thought of birds when I think about the pegasi’s hands but that one finger pipistrelles have left over from the wing membranes is useful, which I don’t think ever happens at that joint on a bird’s wing, does it?
^ Which begs the question of how she ended up in there in the first place. Someone posted in response to my inquiring testily why I keep finding bats on the floor, that they collapse there in exhaustion. Oh dear. I don’t like having small furry flying house guests but I don’t like thinking about what a really awful time they must be having either. But my flower bucket is only about six—seven?—inches across at the top, fifteen inches high, and it’s half-tucked under one of the dust-covered cupboards. What was she doing?+
+ And, may the patron saint of bats help us all, what other bat-traps are there in this house that I need to check before there are dead bats in the bottoms of them?
‡‡‡ Cough cough cough cough hack gak sneeze
§ Yes, of course I have Third House. An attic is still an attic, which is to say a magnet for stuff.^
^ Note that the All Stars collection lives at the cottage. Ahem.
§§ See: appalling housekeeper
§§§ Teach me to garden organically.
#I prefer Elizabeth Moon’s version. She wrote me today:
I just figured this out. It is the same bat, an adolescent female bat, who does not want to spend her life alternately eating bugs and hanging upside down and having bat-babies. She was born in a writer’s house, in your bat nursery, and she’s figured out that you are a very special person. For one thing, you don’t hang upside down all day and eat insects at night. For another, you tell stories.
She thinks, by hanging [sic] around with you, she can learn to be a writer and tell her own stories, and then she can give up the hanging upside down, the annoying attentions of the pimply boy bats her age, and spend her days smelling roses, playing with yarn (she doesn’t quite understand knitting^), singing, and so forth. At night, she could go to belfries and–though she does understand she can’t ring–she could watch you ring and catch any flies or mosquitoes^^ that bothered you. . . . it came to me that this young rebellious bat just wants to be you. Tiny All-Stars on her feet. Pink something (it would have to be very light…)^^^ She may be wondering if she could train a couple of beetles to play hellhound to her hellbat. . . .
I like this version a lot. I especially like the only one bat part.
^I’ll teach her. She’s got two fully functioning fingers on her wing-hands, and prehensile four- (I think) toed claws on her feet.
^^ This would be very popular.
^^^ Ankle bracelet? I’ll plait her a pink friendship bracelet. In thanks for the mosquitoes.
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