Bat Sitting

My kids landed themselves a sweet pet sitting gig. For five days they would feed and water a few cats and clean their litter boxes. Now, I don't mean to brag, but my kids are relatively competent when it comes to pouring stuff, so this job was made for them. All I needed to do was provide transportation, then stand back and watch them enjoy the thrill of gainful employment. Which is just what I was doing, until I noticed something out of place.

 

I could clearly see a little pile of brown on the sunroom floor that hadn't been there before. One of the cats must have puked. Since my kids aren't exactly skilled in the cleaning vomit off of rugs department, I decided to lend a hand. I gathered up as much maturity as I could muster and marched myself resolutely across the room. As I approached the cat vomit, it slowly backed away from me.

 

I may have lost a little of that maturity I had gathered up, in my panicky, screeching, dash to the other side of the French doors, but I wasn't about to go back in there to look for it. That was no ordinary puke. That furball had wings and teeth. It began to dawn on me that I was either dealing with some kind of nightmare cats from another dimension, or that brown stuff wasn't vomit. Okay, so maybe it was a bat. Yup, just a harmless little fuzzy brown bat. A harmless, big eared cutie pie, like a squirrel with wings,  that would bite and scratch the bejeezus out of me and send me to the hospital for a painful series of rabies shots. This was no time for panic. It was time for procrastination.

 

Someone was going to have to deal with that bat, and that someone was going to have to be me. But not yet. I made some phone calls. Yes, the cats are up to date on their vaccines. Good. If the bat is a baby I should return it to it's nest. Really? Call animal control so they can kill it and test it for rabies. But it didn't bite anyone. Leave the windows open so it can fly out when it gets dark. And all sorts of other things can get in? Ugh. Somehow, stalling wasn't getting me anywhere. I needed to put on my big girl pants and get that bat out of the house.

 

I grabbed a large plastic bowl and a laminated placemat, trapped the bat, and tossed everything; bat, bowl and mat, right out the window. Easy as pie. I was feeling a wee bit like a superhero as I secured the window screen in place and slid the window shut. Until I saw what was happening outside.

 

Around the corner of the house came the neighborhood tom cat, striding purposefully toward the bowl of bat sitting on the ground outside the window. My fingers flew to the window locks and I flung the window open. Approximately two inches. Stupid child safety latches! I resorted to pounding on the window and screaming, "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!" as the cat leaned over and put his face in the bowl. At this point, my children, who were safely shut in the kitchen at the other end of the house, were sure I had been bitten. I have to give them credit, because although what I screamed for them to do next surely made no sense to them at all, they immediately did it. "Call Mr Scraggles!!! Go out on the steps and call Mr Scraggles!!!"

 

Luckily, either Mr Scraggles doesn't like bat, or all of the yelling ruined his appetite, because he walked off looking slightly annoyed. Tragedy averted. I rushed outside and, using a long stick, I managed to dump the bat out of the bowl so that nothing else would confuse it for a meal. The bat screamed at me softly in morse code as I did. It may have been thanking me for saving it's life.

 

Now that the bat was safely outside it looked rather cute and helpless. This little mosquito eating ball of fluff was a tiny miracle. I grabbed my camera and got a bit closer to snap a photo. As I did, the bat bared it's teeth at me and rose up on it's wings.

 

Now I know that I am a superhero, because surely, no ordinary person could run as fast as I did while screaming that loudly.