Yesterday at school my afternoon was interrupted by the abrupt arrival in the elementary classroom of a bat. A and Big departed the room rapidly even though the creature was crawling rather than flying – A is not good with small beast of flying, crawling or insectoid natures. There is another member of staff there who is currently doing some kind of voluntary training on how to deal with bats, but she hadn’t got up to the bit of how to deal with them when they are in your building, so she rang for advice, and the advice was to protect it while there were ppl around, then leave it for mum to collect overnight.
Which was what we tried to do, but somewhere in the middle of the protecting it, it disappeared, so we assumed it had gone back whence it came.
Which brings us up to this morning, when, as agreed, I was first into the elementary, to discover it lying exactly where we hadn’t left it last night. It was where we were planning on leaving it, but it most definitely wasn’t there when I went home yesterday. Hohum. So we found some secondary advice, and then ran bat tours up to take a look, several very quiet children at a time – well, you couldn’t really do anything else at that point!
The batman came out this afternoon, scouted the room and found a small hole, poked the bat back through it and blocked it up with a paper tissue. He said to leave it several days and then remove the tissue and block the hole up properly. I’ve got a bad feeling we may have a small corpse by that point – he gave the baby 50/50 chance, which was more than I would have offered after nearly 24 hours with no attention from mum, but we’ll just have to see.
Apparently the day revolved around bat research and the children all learnt lots about native animals today. There’s a surprise!
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