dragonlady7

answered, Anonymous

via https://ift.tt/3htGvMe

Ah, I had actually already researched the bats/rabies thing, because the
baby bats in the living room was discovered by Farmkid and her mother was
quite distressed at the possibility. So, I definitely appreciate your
concern, but a couple of things about that–

1) Little Brown Bats are, firstly, the very most common bats for people to
encounter in their houses up here in the Northeast, since they like to live
in houses as well. So there is a truly vastly enormous sample size of
specimens that have been rabies-tested, and since of course it is within
the parameters of their normal behavior to be inside a person’s house, that
probably skews the results somewhat because so many other types of bats are
only encountered by humans when sick so they’re more likely to have rabies,
but even with all that accounted for, it turns out that basically, Little
Brown Bats don’t get rabies very much and almost never have it when tested
for. Sometimes they have antibodies for it, which indicates that they must
have some resistance to it; it’s not that they never ever have it, of
course, but it’s very, very rare for them. Many other kinds of bats seem to
be more susceptible.

2) these two bats were not really in the room with me, they had both fallen
to the bottom of the staircase that is adjoining the room and could not get
up, hence the persistent scrabbling noises. Had they been in the room with
me, and thus able to get close to me, I would likely not have heard them.
Which, I know, sort of weakens my case because there could have been dozens
of bats in and out of that room all night long, but the fact remains, these
were not sick bats and were behaving as bats should, and also, did not come
near me or touch me at all.

I had to drop Farmkid off at her BFF’s house today and was telling the mom,
she of the rocks in her swim shorts who still needs a great nickname, the
Whitest Lady On Her Block no longer since she lives in the suburbs, and she
was like *oh my god* my old house was *full of bats*, and the house I grew
up in was also full of bats, and my parents had a whole technique involving
a cookie sheet, a tennis racket, and a net for capturing them to release
them– anyway, she has never had rabies and assures me the risks are minimal
with these kinds of bats in this area.

Rabies anon again, my other favorite fun fact about bats is they echolocate
at a horrendously loud volume and a pitch you can’t hear, so it can be very
distressing to be in a room with them flying because your brain is stalling
out over stimuli you can’t process. I’m so sorry, it occurs to me none of
my facts are actually all that fun

LOL firstly congratulations on living a lifestyle that lets you style
yourself Rabies Anon, that is actually a fantastic title.

(Yesterday during chicken processing for various extremely literal reasons
I won’t get into at all I was dubbed Asshole Ripper, so like, you could get
worse nicknames, is all I’m saying. [I was eviscerating, that’s a job that
involves a lot of work with buttholes, we don’t need to elaborate.])

So BIL actually got sonar’d by a bat pretty recently! He said he knew
that’s what happened because even though he couldn’t hear much, he actually
felt the pressure of the little shockwave the thing generated. He said it
was sort of distressing but super cool, in retrospect.

These bats mostly chatter in such a high pitch he can’t hear them at all,
with his hearing damage from using tractors so much– during the height of
the chimney infestation, he was sitting on the couch in there reading, and
I came in and was listening to the bats squeaking and finally he was
like “what are you looking at” and I was like “I’m listening, it’s so loud”
and he was like “…?” It was *so* loud, but he could not hear any of it. It
was kind of startling. Anyway– the finale of Farmkid and Farmsister with
their rescued bat is that they sat on the porch as dusk came on waiting to
see if he’d fly away, and they could hear the bats in the adjoining wall
talking to one another. And they could observe the pattern– they’d come
closer to their exit hole, and then they’d sit there chattering back and
forth for a bit, and then three or four would come out at once and each fly
immediately in a different direction. Clearly they were coordinating their
exit so that if a predator was waiting they wouldn’t all get grabbed!

And they could hear the bat they’d rescued, on the tree, answering the ones
in the house that were calling to him. They didn’t see him fly away, but he
was gone eventually, so likely he’d rejoined his colony.

Oh apparently they roost in semi-gender-segregated little hibernacula
(that’s the real word for it, what a crazy word)? that also seemed cool to
me. So likely there are several bat-roosting places in the house because
the males are in one and the females in another. (Also! Can you tell I
spent a while on Wikipedia! Also the males only produce sperm during
breeding season, that seems so efficient! And the females give birth to
pups that are 30% of their own bodyweight, that is insane! Anyway I’ll
stop. They’ve very cool.)