BATTLE AGAINST BATS
When Ottawa firefighter Matt Dewan and his wife, Katrina, bought an old farmhouse in Kemptville in 2015 to raise their children, it was their dream home. Two years later, it’s a nightmare. Their attic is home to between 500 and 1,000 bats, guano is seepin
When Matthew Dewan and Katrina Arcand learned that the grey farmhouse near Arcand’s childhood home was for sale, it seemed the answer to their need for more space.
They needed room for four children. The Kemptville-area farmhouse on an acre-and-a-half of land near the Rideau River had enough space for everyone and even had a separate playroom.
“Igrewupasafarmgirl.Itwas the greatest thing. I want my children to be here,” Arcand said.
They put all their savings into the house in November 2015, moved in on Dec. 3, and started ripping out wallpaper and layers of old linoleum to expose the pine floors. It was last August 2017 when the real problem started to emerge. Bats, dozens of them, appeared to be crawling out of a space behind an unused chimney.
Intrigued, they wondered if they had a “nest” of bats behind a decommissioned chimney. Closer inspection revealed a mound of bat excrement, known as guano. They removed the chimney, but the number of bats emerging from the fascia, the vents and the siding seemed to grow. Watching the bats emerge and fly on summer nights was like watching a movie, Arcand said.
“We counted 63 one night.” Dewan, an Ottawa firefighter, and Arcand, a homemaker, needed professional help. It turns out, the bats they could see were only the tip of the iceberg. There was bat guano in the attic and it was piled 1.5 metres deep inside the walls of the old balloon-framed house.
“We thought it was just oldhouse smell. It turns out it was bat guano,” Arcand said.
The house was inspected when they bought it. But the attic, accessible only through a small door, had been sealed. Their insurance company said they weren’t covered for bat damage. (Most insurance policies have wording that excludes settlements for damage caused by animals, including birds, raccoons, insects, rodents and bats, said Pete Karageorgos, the director of consumer and industry relations with the Insurance Bureau of Canada.)
Stephane Boucher, the owner of Canadian Pest Control Service in Perth, looked into the problem, cutting a hole though the ceiling to access the attic. He believes there are two bat species in the attic colony — little brown bats and big brown bats.
Boucher worked in animal control for 23 years and says this case was one of his “top five” bat cases in recent years.
“Obviously, the bats had been there for decades. You just know when they ’ve been there for a long time. The bats have been there for so long that the guano has seeped into the wood. It attracts more bats. The bats know there’s a roost there.”
Some species of bats are protected animals in Ontario and can’t be killed. So, evicting bats means sealing every hole, leaving a few exits with one-way doors, a process known as “excluding.” Once the bats leave, they can’t get back in, although they may simply move to a nearby barn or another attic.
The cost to merely exclude the bats from their attic? Best-case scenario is $15,000, said Dewan. “And they ’ll be back, even if we seal up every crack and hole.”
It would cost thousands more to remove the guano from the attic and between the walls. The guano had done permanent damage to the wood, and the couple fears the ceiling will eventually collapse under the weight of guano. There is seepage in some spots of the second-floor ceiling, he said.
Even if they did manage to exclude the bats, it would be hard to make the house bat-proof because the old structure is so porous. The old tin roof has hundreds of crevices the bats could use as entry and exit points.
And bats will return to their roost and try, very determinedly, to get back to their home roost. Bats can squeeze themselves — their bone structure is very pliable — into a hole the size of a fingertip.
The news on other options was just as bad. It would be impossible to tear the house down to the frame, remove the guano, then rebuild the house using the original frame because that wouldn’t meet building code. Besides, exposure to bat guano means a risk of histoplasmosis, an infection caused by a fungus found in the droppings of birds and bats.
“Every once in a while, we would get a glimmer of hope,” Dewan said. “Then, any time we think something great was going to happen
... no. It’s just one thing after another.”
The only viable option is to demolish the house and start from scratch, say Dewan and Arcand. But the estimate for rebuilding a house of the same size is $475,000, plus taxes. Dewan and Arcand would be left with their original mortgage, plus the cost of building a new house.
Earlier this week, Arcand’s sister, Kristel, posted a GoFundMe page for the rebuild, which attracted more than $1,400 in donations by Wednesday afternoon.
“The bottom line is that we’ve bought a house that’s worth nothing,” said Dewan, who jokes that the only solution is to win a lottery. “We’re in a lose-lose situation.”
Many conservationists believe that it’s not just possible, but necessary for humans to coexist with bats, which perform an invaluable ecological service in consuming insects, including agricultural pests. Bats living in an attic can be “excluded” to a limited area, making it possible to collect the guano in one spot, where it can be easily removed.
It’s common for people to have bats and not know it, said Brock Fenton, a bat biologist at Western University who has studied the winged mammals for more than 50 years.
He doesn’t think it’s necessary for Arcand and Dewan to demolish their house because it’s home to a colony of bats. Unlike rodents, bats don’t chew or make holes, and they don’t cause damage. Guano, he points out, is an excellent fertilizer.
“I would just fix it so they can’t get in so easily, and say, ‘Thank goodness they’re eating all those bugs.’ ”
Arcand and Dewan have learned a lot about bats in past few months. “They ’re amazing creatures. Really, we’re squatting on their place.” Dewan said.
“I didn’t know anything about bats before,” Arcand said. “Not that I like them now, but they’re fascinating creatures.”