When consulted about removing bats from one of our rental properties in Luverne, the exterminator from Sioux Falls said, “Yeah. Wow. Luverne is freaking filled with bats.”
I already knew that.
My husband serves on the Blue Mound Area Theatre Board. The Board spent five figures to remove bats from the historic Palace Theatre.
We rent a building on Main Street for our photography business. Once, my husband took a portrait off a wall and uncovered a bat. He put the bat outside. It crawled back across the sidewalk and lay by the door. (Imagine trying to present yourself as a gifted photographer while fighting off a zombie bat.)
We have a small six-unit apartment building near Main Street. We paid $2,000 last year to eradicate the bats from that structure.
And joked, “They will probably just go down the street and move into the attic of our rental house. Ha ha.”
Imagine our surprise when the new tenant in that rental house said her son had bedbug bites.
Since neither she nor we could determine the source of the bugs, we hired the bedbug exterminator to clear the house.
And for a mere $1,300 he did.
And then he said, “But you don’t have bedbugs. You have bat bugs. They are living on the bats in the attic. Until you get rid of the bats, the bugs will keep coming back.”
We have bats? They have bugs? Bat bugs? There is such a thing as this?
The bite-covered son of our tenant suggests, “yes.”
So, we paid the guy $1,500 to install one-way bat doors and plug all the bat entrances which is any hole larger than a dime.
Other than turning our rental property business into a not-for-profit enterprise, this bat nonsense has given us an idea.
My husband and I are contemplating writing a grant to fund a bat habitat. We’re going to call it a bat-i-tat.
Believe it or not, I harbor no ill will toward these disgusting little, bug-infested, money-consuming, flying rats. I appreciate that they eat mosquitoes.
I harbor no ill will, but I do wish some other place could be “freaking filled with bats”
Like the bat-i-tat or … maybe Hardwick?