While they get a bad reputation as blood-sucking beasts or transforming vampires, bats are relatively harmless creatures. However, they can be a real annoyance and potentially spread rabies. If you think you have bats in your house, you need to know how to handle them before they nest and breed in your home.

The Truth About Bats

Bats, despite their ability to fly, are common mammals in North America. Nearly all bats eat fruit and insects. In fact, eating insects makes bats an important part of insect control and essential to the ecosystem.

These winged creatures thrive in areas with lots of food and shelter and are attracted to dark, quiet spaces away from predators. Natural habitats include caves and other secluded areas, like barns, attics and sheds.

Roosting for bats occurs for three reasons: eating, sleeping and breeding. Bats are often seen hanging upside down from rafters and trees in order to digest the previous night’s meal.

In colder climates, bats want to live in stable weather conditions and will wait out the cold season by huddling together in groups and hibernating. During the mating season, bats seek out protected environments for nursery colonies. Female bats will share the same roost and create a colony of bat babies.

What to Do When You Find Bats

Since bats can fit into half-inch openings, practically every manmade structure is a veritable hiding place. Some of the more common places you could find bats are in attics, barns, storage sheds and unused structures like a dog house, along with chimneys, sidings, soffits, roof tiles and eaves.

When you actually find a bat, whether it flies into your house or rests somewhere in or around your property, you do not want to handle it. Bats are shy, meek animals and do their best not to come into contact with humans.

If you try to grab the bat, you are setting yourself up for bat bites, which can lead to rabies. Although few bats actually have rabies, it’s still possible, considering over half of rabies cases each year are from bat bites. Do not touch or handle the bats and be very careful when you’re close to them.

Removing Bats

If a bat is in your house, seal it off from the rest of the house by closing the doors. The bat is probably very scared, so if you leave all the windows and doors open, it will get the message and leave on its own. Those who try to capture a bat should not use bare hands. Get heavy work gloves and a small container, such as a coffee can, to trap the bat and release it outside.

Roosting bats need the help an expert exterminator or pest control agency. Hundreds of bats live together at any given time. If you notice droppings or dark smudges in places like a barn or shed, call someone who can use exclusion methods to force the bats to leave without coming back.