Bats in attic? Banish them before maternity time

Lori Wurtzel can’t decide which was the more horrifying bat encounter in her Maitland home last month: She and her husband, Ben, awaking to a pair of winged intruders flying circles above their bed or their terrier Ollie holding a dead one in his mouth.

“Bats are unequivocally creepy,” said Wurtzel, 34, a lawyer. “I mean, think of it, they’re a symbol of Halloween.”

By the time a nuisancewildlife specialist evicted the cluster of bats from the home, the couple and their two toddler daughters had received precautionary rabies shots, Ollie had been quarantined and they had forked out $4,000 to reclaim their house from the only mammals capable of flight.

But the Wurtzels were lucky. They discovered the bats before “bat maternity season,” which begins April 15 and lasts until Aug. 15.

Some legal options to get rid of bats are illegal during that four-month period, which is intended to protect the species, and a hard-toget state permit is required to get rid of them.

Bats enjoy special protection because many varieties are endangered and they’re important to Florida’s ecosystem because of their appetite for mosquitoes and other flying insects that damage crops. A Brazilian free-tailed bat, common in Central Florida, weighs about half an ounce and is no longer than a finger but devours hundreds of insects a night.

Born in the spring or early summer, bat pups are furless and can’t yet fly.

“The season lasts until the pups can fly and feed themselves,” said Terry Doonan, a state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist.

As they grow, the tiny mouse-like mammals are reputed to eat their body weight in bugs nightly, although some experts say that’s a slight exaggeration.

The state wildlife agency recently distributed an advisory to news outlets to alert homeowners with bat issues to take action before April 15.

Bats and their guano cause their share of grief and worry for Central Florida homeowners, but state authorities don’t have statistics on bat removals. Some wildlife-extraction firms say they do at least one or two bat jobs a week here, typically charging $2,500 or more, depending on the complexity of the work.

“We stay busy with bats,” said Steve Demoor of Orlando-based “Dr. Critter,” which has been in business 25 years.

An effective method of ousting bat colonies from attics, chimneys and eaves require entrances as small as a quarter to be sealed, preventing mature bats from squeezing into the roost after a nightly hunt for dinner. The so-called bat exclusions, legal most of the year, are illegal during this maternity season to prevent young bats that cannot yet fly from being trapped inside and dying.

Maitland Mayor Howard Schieferdecker, whose home near Lake Olive was plagued with roosting bats about three years ago, discovered the horde hiding under the Spanish tiles on his roof a month into bat maternity season.

“It was horrible, horrible,” he recalled. “You couldn’t do anything about it. These things are just multiplying [and] you can’t touch ’em.”

The swarm was so thick in the late summer mornings, it virtually blotted out the sky.

“It was like they invited all their friends to come. ‘Have a big party,’ ” he said.

He hired a nuisance-wildlife crew after bat-maternity season ended and they set up tubes that funneled the colony into 5-gallon buckets, which they hauled away.

Doonan said bats, which are nocturnal animals with small mouths and smaller teeth, usually get a bad rap, despite their key role in insect control.

First, they don’t suck blood, attack people or get tangled in your hair, he said, listing common myths.

They’re also not blind, he said, noting they hunt at night using a keen sense of hearing, a sonar ability called echolocation and agile flying skills.

“You always get these stories about vampires and Dracula. You don’t always hear the cute, warm, fuzzy bat stories,” Doonan said. But he cited “Stellaluna,” a children’s book that tells the story of a fruit bat separated from its mother. It has been featured on the PBS series “Reading Rainbow” and in “I Am Sam,” a Sean Penn film about a father with an intellectual disability.

Doonan, a wildlife biologist for 24 years, warned against handling bats because of the risk of rabies.

According to statistics for 2015, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had complete figures, bats were the most frequently reported rabid wildlife species, accounting for about 30.9 percent of the nation’s 5,509 animal rabies cases.