I hope my more socially conservative readers will excuse the language in this title. Somehow “bat guano” or “bat poo” or “bat feces” didn’t really get across the situation I was dealing with. What I really tackled after work today was nothing more and nothing less than several mountains of bat shit and bat urine piss that had built up in another one of our outbuildings over the course of a decade.
In addition to the bats and their aforementioned organic fertilizer, the loft in this outbuilding also held a few hundred wasp and mud-dobber / mud wasp nests, several urine-soaked nudie mags from the 1980s and, disturbingly, a few child-sized girls undergarments. The older couple that lived here from the 1980′s to about a five or six years ago were Mormon grade-school teachers before he passed away and she moved back north to spend her last days with family, since passing away herself. So I will give everyone the benefit of a doubt and chalk my finds up to “random crap you’ll find in an old farm building” and leave it at that. Maybe the nudie mags were insulation for the bats’ comfort, and the unmentionables were being saved for a yard sale. Either way it was a surreal evening, which I thought appropriate to follow up with a surreal picture Missy took before I stormed the bat cave and did away with the mess once and for all.
I had a similar experience (well sort of – I didn’t have to deal with the underwear). My barn had very old hay in it (newpapers from the 60′s mixed in the hay), old trash, dead bird skeletons and bat droppings. It took a while to clean up (I definitely had to use a dust mask).
It’s funny when you tell someone you have bats in your out buildings. I always hear the ‘How neat, bats eat sooo many bugs’. Yeah right. I tried to build a workshop in the hay mow of my barn, but the bat crap everywhere was a real pain. Had to move my workshop into the second level of the milk shed!
Good Luck!
Wow; that is just overwhelming to consider, all that you did and encountered. Again, y’all are my heroes! Pix when you can…
What kind of monkey shine is this?
Reminds me of an episode of Jeff Corwin when he was in a cave climbing a mountain of bat guano. Yuck.
Just….gross! I guess this is all part of the not so minor details of getting an old farm up to snuff.
HA, yea a bit gross. One thing I didn’t expect is to have to spend our first two months on the farm cleaning up OTHER people’s stuff before we got a chance to start our own projects.
But like YM said, that’s just all part of the job. I actually enjoy doing work like that because it doesn’t take a lot of skill and so it is something that I CAN do – unlike the carpentry stuff. But man-o-man, did I need a shower after that!
Are you leaving the bats or chasing them away? Here in Wisconsin, folks are building bat houses in places where accumulating guano is okay, because nothing is better for natural mosquito control.
It seems bats are pretty particular about where they roost. Check the internet for plans.
Hello Bill,
The bats are gone, including all of the dead ones I had to suck up with the shopvac.
Funny you should mention that though. I thought about it as I was cleaning everything up: What if I could make a living selling guano???
It was a passing thought though.
I put up bat boxes, thinking that the bats would prefer them. Didn’t work. I guess my barn was perfect for them. I spent a lot of time replacing battens, sealing up knotholes, etc. They still got in. Something you have to live with!
Ohhh, I feel sorry for you man! I once saw what bats could do to the attic of a 150 year old home. It wasn’t pretty.
Given all that you are trying to do, perhaps the bat house goes on the list of winter-time projects.
I am enjoying the blog. You are doing that thing that I dream of. You just had the opportunity and the guts to do it. Best of luck.
Jackie, yep when you combine the bats with mud-wasps, hornets, mice, spiders, snakes… it makes for a fairly gory ecosystem. I love the way you pronounce the name of your blog by the way.
Bill and Uncle Tractor I’ll definitely be taking your advice and skipping the bat-house thing for now. LOL, we have enough to do on our OWN house before I go building one for those darn bats!