ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Mid-August is prime time for bat activity, and health departments in our region are seeing a huge increase in the number of calls from people who have encountered a bat in their home.

When people have a problem with bats, they call Nick Sager of The Batman Bat Removal Company.

“They (bats) like our houses for the same reason as we do — predators can’t get to them, it’s warm, it’s dry, it’s a consistent temperature,” he tells News10NBC.

Bats squeeze themselves into the tiniest of spaces, and they’re most active right now in the middle of August.

“The pups are now flying, proficiently flying and so like kids, they don’t always listen and so often people will meet their bats in pairs, or even three … and a lot of times that’s going to be a pup and a mama,” Sager explains.

That’s what happened to Sara Weise.

“I started to hear this flapping noise that I couldn’t place, and I looked down the hallway and it was like going back and forth between my bathroom and my kitchen,” she says. She was able to trap the first few bats and release them out the window, but they just kept coming back. “They like screech at each other through the walls,” Weise says.

After hounding her landlord, a bat specialist was brought in. “They told me there was a mature roost of bats living in the crawl space above my bed, somewhere between 75 and 120 bats. Juveniles, the whole way to old bats and that they had been there for a very long time, much longer than me,” she says.

Weise’s case may be a bit extreme but it only takes one bat to put a human in danger. “If you wake up at 3am and there’s a bat beside you — this has happened — a bat beside you on the bed or a bat flying around the room, you don’t know if it’s had contact with you. They have tiny, tiny teeth and really it’s more like an insect bite than an animal bite, so it may not wake you up,” explains Kate Ott, the Director of Public Health for Ontario County.

About 2-3% of bats carry rabies. If you’re able to catch the bat you encounter, your health department will test it, but if you’re not, they’re going to suggest you get the rabies vaccine.

The only problem with that? “My insurance wouldn’t cover them unless I could prove beyond reasonable doubt that I had been bitten by a bat, so it would have cost me a few thousand dollars out of pocket, which I couldn’t do,” Weise says.

Luckily, she was okay, but she’s actually moved out of that apartment because of the whole experience. The Batman works to make sure it’s the bats who move out, not you.

“Bats are a protected animal, some are almost on the endangered list — like we have the little brown bat and they’re dying off — so we don’t want to kill them, we just want to kick them out. We just don’t want to live with them,” Sager says.

All of our local health departments have someone on-call this time of year 24/7 to be able to respond to calls about bats and walk you through what you should do if you think you’ve been exposed.

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