postmodern Belfry

In the "cool creatures in my life" vein, I have another story.

I had an exam today. Thus last night, I was all about the getting to bed early and sleeping well. We did pretty okay. I was starting to drift off by about 11:30 when fishy says "Did you hear that?"

Yes, I'd heard it. But I wasn't about to get out of bed to investigate. I'm lazy that way. fishy, on the other hand, is not so lazy, and is quite proactive about investigating strange noises in the house. He got up and headed into the hallway... and he was gone for quite a long time. By this time I was wide awake and thought I'd maybe better get out of bed. Especially since there was definitely something in the hall.

It was out of the hall, closed in the sunroom with fishy, by the time I was out of the bedroom. And when fishy poked his head out to warn me to stay low, I could see it.

It looked something like this. Only much faster. And bigger. They look a lot bigger when they're flying in your house.

I've seen lots of little brown bats before, and this one was clearly larger, even when one controls for apparent bat-in-house size. When it landed on the windowsill, I'd say the body was the length of my palm, which is pretty big for a bat. Big brown bat it was.

fishy wanted a hat, and though I would normally scoff at such a request (what the hell does a bat want with your hair?) it was pretty clear that our guest was dive-bombing. Out of respect for the fact that I was pretty sure both he and the bat would have simultaneous heart attacks if it did manage to hit the head, I got him a hat. Then fishy managed to keep the sunroom door closed, light off, and open all the windows and remove the screens. The door to the rest of the house was closed, and we left our guest alone.

We decided to name the bat Belfry, since we don't have a belfry for the bat to be in. However, now the bat is the belfry and thus we have both. Problem solved.

Also, the bat is no longer in the house. At some time in the night he found the open windows, and when we checked this morning he was gone.