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Index of Subjects This evening about 9 pm I was sitting at my computer working when I caught a flickering motion out of the corner of my left eye. Turning my head, I realized that a bat was flying around my office space. I alerted my friend Tim, who has the office next door to mine, and we watched in wonder and amazement as the little animal flitted noiselessly from one room to another, gracefully avoiding encounters with any of the many, many hard objects that lay in its path. I was struck by how different its behaviour was from the way a bird would probably behave in a similar situation: The bat's flight was, to human ears anyway, absolutely silent. And it seemed slow relative to that of a bird. (Yet the wing motion was quite rapid, almost strobe-like, especially at the tips of the wings.) The bat gave the impression that it was, in an unhurried but purposeful way, exploring every room of the house. But its flight was so quiet and calm that my dog, who would ordinarily have been in a frenzy to get at any wild animal that came into the house (even a wild house fly), completely ignored it. Of course, I instantly forgot everything you're supposed to do when there's a bat in your house. But neither Tim nor I had the slightest sense that the bat was in a hurry to leave or that we had to be in a rush to get it out of the house. As a precaution, I decided to take the dog downstairs and lock her in the bathroom. While I was taking the dog down the back stairs, Tim reports that the bat finished exploring the upstairs part of the house, flew down the front stairs, and started flitting around the living room. In fairly short order, the bat explored most of the downstairs part of the house and started flying back and forth in the kitchen, where there were a few moths that had come in when the door was open to let the dogs in and out (which, we suspect, is how the bat got in -- probably in pursuit of one of said moths). Tim stood in the interior doorway because he'd discovered that the bat would not come near enough to him to fly through a doorway he was standing in; that kept the bat in the kitchen (not that the bat seemed particularly interested in leaving the kitchen -- it seemed to be very happy hunting those moths). I opened the door to the outside and held it open, standing as far back from the opening as I could. After a few passes back and forth in the kitchen (and, I think, a snack) the bat simply flew out the kitchen door, right past me, and into the night. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit from our late-night guest. Wild Flora in Birch Hill PS: Now that I don't need the information any more, I read in Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife, by the Humane Society of the United States, that "don't panic" is always a good policy when encountering a bat in the house, that bats tend to fly toward openings (hence the ease with which we got it to fly outside), and that bats in confined spaces tend to gain altitude near walls while losing altitude in the center of the room, which sometimes leads people who are standing in the middle of a room to think they are being "attacked." We did not notice that last behavior; on the contrary, the bat maintained a fairly even altitude at about head-height and never displayed anything that even remotely resembled aggression toward anyone--except those moths.
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