The Dodge House - a bat story

When I was a young girl, my family bought a stone house in the Thousand Islands as a summer home. We came up weekends during the year and spent the summer there.

One weekend, when we were coming home at dusk, we turned into our drive and as the headlights shone up the hill, we could see bats going into the house through the eaves. My Dad was horrified, and I was interested. Dad hired an exterminator to come spray the attics. When we came back the next weekend, we stopped in the driveway to be sure there were no bats. There they were. As many as before. In a matter of minutes we could count 50 to 100. My Dad decided,"If you want something done right, you do it yourself!"

So they bought a canister vacuum cleaner. Saturday morning they set up the ladder to the second story eaves on the front of the house. Mom went up the ladder first holding the nozzle and Dad followed carrying the vaccum filled with the poisonous powder.  Let me explain that we had eight huge sugar maples out in front of the house all in full leaf. I was told to go out front and stay out of the way. When my Dad turned on the vacuum at first nothing happened. But in a few minutes, the bats started flying out from the eaves. There was a black cloud of them, hundreds. It was daylight and they were poisoned. Their radar was all confused.  They were shreiking and when they got to the sugar maples most of them dropped down to fly under the trees. There I was, an eight year old child with long hair! The bats crashed into me. They were screaming and so was I. Eventually I heard my Dad yelling‚"Run." Mom and Dad were slow to get down off the ladder because of carrying the vacuum. Up to this point, I was ok. Scared but still functioning. As I got to the driveway, if I had been thinking I would have known better, but that was where the closest door to the house was. As I started up the driveway, the bats were coming out the eaves there, in hundreds again. This time I froze. I didn't hear my Dad yelling and I couldn't move. He caught up to me and scooped me up and carried me into the house. The amazing part was, none of us was bitten.

To this day I still don't like bats. At night when I sit out in the yard at dusk, if I see anything flying in the sky, I call them night sparrows. That is what they are to me. I don‘t want to be afraid to sit in the yard at night, so they are night  sparrows. My husband says,"Yes Dear," like the good man he is. From that day on until the day she passed, my Mom always said, "If there is a hole, caulk it." Bats can make themselves pretty thin and there are often cracks between the stone and the wooden eaves. We always made sure those cracks were filled. We haven't had another bat problem in 50 years. I know bats are a wonderful animal that do a lot of good. We just didn't want to share our home with hundreds of them. Today there may be other ways to solve a bat problem in your house. Back in the 1960s that was the only solution that we knew of. Lesson learned: "If there is a hole, caulk it."

– Jackie LaMora