This Week With Jane and Charley: A Bat in the House – The Night Charley Turned Into Tippi Hedren

(The continuing adventures of Charley, the little black cat that Tim sent me the day after he passed. Read all about her shenanigans here. -jb)

This week’s installment of The Adventures of Charley finds our little black cat very concerned when a bat somehow found his way into the house two nights ago. I have no idea WHEN the bat came into the house, but we discovered him at 3 a.m. If you’ve been reading the Gazette for a while, you know that we’re usually awake at this hour because we’re night owls (and thank goodness for that, in this case).

It wasn’t a huge bat – about as big as my hand – and he was flying around the upstairs hallway, flapping methodically into the rooms and back out into the hallway. I sheltered in place in one room, peering out the door as my son Will and I devised a plan to get the little creature back outside.

The bat kept landing on the window screen at the end of the hallway. It’s like he knew freedom was just a few centimeters away. So we decided to put a small trash can over him, slide a piece of cardboard over the end, and take him down the stairs and out the door.

My job was to hold the trash can over the bat. While I was doing that and waiting for Will to find a suitable piece of cardboard, the bat was flopping around in there, trying his best to free himself by sliding his feet out from under the trash can onto the screen. He was squealing a little while this was going on. It was all I could do not to cut and run.

But I held my ground until Will arrived with the cardboard. He then took our surprise guest down the stairs, out the front door, and basically threw everything into the driveway.

While all this was going on, Charley crouched down on my bed with a look of sheer terror as the bat swooped in and out of the room. Picture that scene in “The Birds” where Tippi Hedren waits on a bench outside the Bodega Bay School, smoking a cigarette as she suddenly notices that the jungle gym on the playground is filling up with birds. Charley is Tippi Hedren in this scenario.

Then, just like how Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette herd the kids outside and tell them to be as quiet as possible until they’re told to run as fast as they can, Charley slinks off the bed in panther mode, crawls on her belly through the hallway, and runs down the stairs at top speed. Fortunately (VERY fortunately), she did not get pecked by the bat, as some of the kids did by the birds on their way down the hill from the schoolhouse.

I did not have my wits about me enough to retrieve my phone from the other room during the Great Bat Incident of 2023 (and wanted to avoid being in the hallway with the bat as much as possible). But as I was writing this story, Charley heard a woodpecker pecking the side of the house and went behind my computer screen to investigate. You can see the resemblance.

Now, I’m just wondering HOW the bat got into the house. Is there a hole somewhere I need to deal with? Did he fly inside when a door was open? Will has a tendancy to wander around outside at night talking on his phone, so it’s very possible the bat could have come in when he opened the door.

I also wonder if he might have come through the woodstove chimney at the roofline. I have a call out to my chimney guy to come check the flashing and seal there, because water trickles through there during heavy rains.

Either way, I’m hoping to avoid another unwanted bat guest appearance in the house. I know Charley is, too.

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