The (Other) Animals that Live in My House

More stories about life in our hand-built house in the woods.  While writing this I started humming, "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small...."

I pretend that it’s only my husband and me living in this house, but honestly all kinds of other creatures call this place home.

Termites.  Carpenter ants.  Mice.  Wood rats.  Bats. 

(Also some visitors.  Birds fly in an open door.   A feral cat sneaks in occasionally for our cat’s food.  Various bugs come and go.    Ron says that when he was first building the house and the windows weren’t yet in, he woke one morning in his sleeping bag on the floor and there was a deer in the living room.)

Most of us have shared living space with various wild animals.  Living in New York City, I felt like I was renting from the cockroach landlords.

But this is the first time I have cohabited with bats. 

Hundreds of bats live under the redwood shakes that cover the outside of our house.  Our friend Byrd lived here while the house was still being built and his rent was to mill the shakes off old redwood stumps on our property, remnants of the early 20th century logging along the central coast. (Chop them off vertically with an old chisel axe-type tool, the froe.)

Byrd left us a huge collection of redwood shakes, and Ron nailed them to the outside of the house one summer (1972).   Then it was school time, and Ron went back to Berkeley to teach more Unitarian-Universalist minister candidates and to wonder about how his half-built house was doing 140 miles to the south. 

Well, the forest denizens must have quickly scouted out this new empty housing development, because the next summer when he returned, he heard curious squeaking in the walls.  At dawn and dusk he’d see flashes of black beings darting around outside the house.  He realized bats had moved in under the shakes.

The collective term for bats is a “colony.”  I guess we were colonized.  Did they come on little ships from another land?  Or imperialistically arrive to rape and pillage our native land/house?

Actually they are most welcome co-habitants.  Their squeaking in the walls is sort of comforting.  Their darting flights at dawn and dusk are little ballets or Blue Angel flyovers.  (Contrary to folklore they do not try to fly in your hair or bite your neck.  Their radar is really good and they stay far away from any other life form they can detect. I’ve sat outside til dark and listened to their whirring and never been touched.)

Like all animals they eat and screw and poop.  That's taken some getting used to.

Well, the eating part is an unexpected bonus.  They eat all the bugs.  We have nary a mosquito or deer fly.  They are like goats in the poison oak - they are thrilled to eat the very thing that annoys us the most.  Thanks you bats!

The pooping?  Well, if we needed any proof that bats were living under the shakes, we get it from all the regular piles of little bat poop pellets on the stairs every morning (especially warm days - I think they sleep more on cold days.)   Ron the first time builder had put the staircases outside the house - ingenious, and fine in California, except the rainy season.  Since the bats live under the shakes that line these stairs, the redwood steps are their litter box.  Poopy.  I try to sweep them regularly.  Then it rains.  Wet and poopy, slippery on wet redwood steps.  Just a part of living here.  Always use the railings, especially in the dark. 

And their sexual habits?  One spring early morning I was sleeping in my daughter’s old room that looks out over the big deck and I was wakened by a strange rhythmic thumping noise.  Whop whop whop.  Confused by being in a different room and by the early hour, I lifted my sleepy head to look out the windows.  Hundreds, maybe thousands of bats were flying in a tight circle above the deck on the lower level, round and round.  But they flew so fast and frenetically that they had abandoned the precision formations I had always observed.  The thumping was an occasional bat hitting the house, but even that seemed barely to slow them down.  I peered in confusion and awe, until the day got lighter, and gradually the circle slowed and the bats flew away, maybe back to their redwood shake beds.  (It’s hard not to make a Dracula reference here, back to the coffin as the sun rises.)

Later I described this strange phenomenon to a park ranger I know who is also a bat expert, she even builds little bat houses at the park and interprets how great bats are.  Oh yes, she said, that’s a spring ritual that is rarely observed.  We think it might have something to do with mating, some kind of group ritual that’s intense and deliberate.  Oh, I said, you mean group sex?  (This was at a lecture she was giving on bats.  It was a wee bit dry.  I think I was trying to liven it up.)

Well yes, she said, you could call it that.  Mating in flight?  Then do they build nests?  How long is gestation?   There is still more to learn about my neighbors.  Well, my roommates.  Glad they moved in.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter