Uninvited House Guests

Courier Countryside Column May 10 under headline:  

I'm not letting wildlife I share this home with drive me bats

 

If you live in an old house in the country you get used to sharing it with an extensive assortment of creatures and insects.

Our place was built around 1480 making it - as I never tire of telling - Plantagenet rather than Tudor. Since Richard III was dethroned, countless generations and a wide variety of spider species have made it their home. It’s definitely no place for arachnophobes.

Indeed in spring it’s no place for anyone of a nervous disposition. Birds nesting under the eaves make extraordinarily loud scrapings and scufflings in the early hours. Until I put a mesh over the top of the chimneystack, a succession of starlings filled the flues with twigs and moss resulting in smoke blowing back and filling rooms. Cleaning the chimney became an annual penance with sackfulls of debris to be removed.

Mice, too, regard the house as their own des res. Since the cat died they’ve become ever bolder in their nesting choices and they seem as oblivious to the dog as Myrtle is to them. I feel bad about evicting them, but am annoyed when they chomp their way through my larder or rip up perfectly good picnic rugs in the loft.

Until last year the attic was also home to not one but two sets of bats. I’m no chiroptophobe – in fact I’m quite fond of their furry bodies and umbrella-like wings, but two complete colonies did make an awful mess. The carpet of droppings was bad enough, but the ammonia odor of urine was worse.

We once called in the local bat protection society to identify them. The chaiman turned out to be called Robin, which rather upset Mrs B’s little Batman joke. He spent a good deal of time rubbing droppings between finger and thumb and sniffing the result to analyse their diet.  Eventually he pronounced one lot common pipistrelles: a bit disappointing – you don’t want plebby bats in your house do you? But the second colony was the rarer brown long-ear.  Anyway, after using the place as a toilet for a decade, they upped and left. Whenever I go up there I still shine the torch at the apex hoping to see that mass of little brown bodies suspended upside-down, undulating gently.

I found some droppings outside the back door today so they clearly haven’t moved far.