Three days ago I got up at my usual unearthly hour of the morning to make my pot of tea. When I switched on the light in the kitchen, a creature flew past me and I thought, "by Jove that is a big moth" .There certainly have been a hatch of big moths the last few days but when it flew past again I saw it was a Micro-bat. We have had the little creatures in the house before. They seem to be able to sneak in but then can't find their way out.
For three days I have been hunting in the day to try and find it before it starved to death and I would find it on the floor somewhere as I did once before. I blogged about that too if you care to look at previous blogs....So I looked behind curtains, Pictures on the wall, wall hangings , door frames etc...Each evening it would fly into my bedroom as I was reading in bed and last night it settled briefly on the door frame and left again. I slept with the bedroom door closed not fancying having it fly over my head as I slept which in other times that has happened and it woke me up....
So this morning I finally found it tucked up high on the brick wall above the bookcase. What to do?
I rang the Aldinga person who had previously put bat recording stations on our place.He very kindly brought a net on a longish pole and as you can see by the pictures he managed to get it into the net and we took it outside to photograph it.
If you click on the photos you can see what fierce rows of teeth it has.
It looks quite cute with its mouth closed and you can see by the gloved hand how tiny it really is.
You have to be really careful handling bats as they can transmit some awful disease to humans but they do an excellent job of keeping night time insects under control. I can't tell you its name at this stage but I may be able to do that when we have had it identified....
I will release it tonight in the dark and hopefully it will assuage it's hunger by slaughtering huge numbers of insects......
We think it is a Lesser Long eared Bat Nyetophilus geoffroyi
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