By Ben Smith:
This time of the year is pretty slow for an outdoor writer. It’s hot and not to mention the fact that we’ve had close to fifteen inches of rain since the beginning of June. There’s plenty of opportunities to go fishing, but I’ve avoided it for the most part due to the weather. Plus, the fishing that I most enjoy during the summer months is on the river and right now every river around here is so high you can reach the gulf without a motor in a couple hours. I’d thought about kayaking to the gulf this summer, but I haven’t quite worked the logistics out just yet.
So, given all of that, I’ve been looking for content to get us through this portion of the year and sometimes content comes from the weirdest places…like my back porch. For starters, we’ve got all kinds of critters that pass through our yard from time to time. I constantly battle rabbits eating our little garden. And even though we live in a subdivision, I’ve killed more squirrels over the last few years in our yard than you can shake a stick at. Somehow when I kill one, three more take its place. I haven’t quite figured that out yet. We’ve had deer in our yard on several occasions. No, I haven’t killed a yard deer yet but if they figure out how to get in the backyard and into our garden we’ll have fresh backstraps to go with the tomatoes and cucumbers.
We have a lot of different birds that hang out around here. Bluebirds, Mockingbirds, Cardinals, and Doves are my favorite to watch from the windows. We see hawks pretty regularly swooping down on the squirrels and every now and then I’ll hear an owl outside at night. The coolest bird we’ve had is a Bald Eagle. Normally, we only see it during the winter months, so it’s been a while since he’s shown up. All of those are great, but I was not prepared for the little flying critter we encountered the other day.
I think it was Saturday and my wife was doing a little grilling on the deck coming off of our back porch. That’s right, my wife does the majority of the grilling at our house. The rest of you fellas need to take notes on how to run your home. And no, I don’t need some macho speech about how it’s a man’s job to grill. If I’ve got the option of grilling myself or watching a good looking woman do it, I’m going with the latter. I digress. Anyway, she came running into the house for me to come outside to look at something. She freaks out pretty easily over any living critter being where it shouldn’t, so I didn’t move too fast.
To kind of explain where this critter was, I’ll have to detail our back porch. It’s about eight feet wide, twenty feet long, and covered. It sits up about seven feet from the ground, so we have a deck that extends from it. For lighting, we have those little canister lights recessed into the ceiling. Therein lies the problem. One of those lights became loose a year or so ago and hangs a little from the ceiling. I reckon I was supposed to fix it, but it just keeps slipping my mind. The opening from where the light is dangling is just enough for critters to get into. I guess they get in there for more protection from the elements or other critters. I’ve killed several wasps trying to build nests in there, but I wasn’t ready for what was in it Saturday.
My wife, in about as calm of a voice as she can muster, told me she thinks there’s a bat in that can light. My first thought was, “there’s no way a bat is in that.” But she was pretty adamant that it was a bat. Upon my inspection, she was right. Now, there’s a lot of things that creep people out that don’t bother me. Most people are afraid of snakes. Snakes don’t bother me much. I usually just kill them and go about my day. However, bats absolutely freak me out. For one, they are quite possibly the most hideous looking creature that God ever made. Beady little eyes that they might as well not even have. Pointy little ears. Fangs. Naw, not something pretty to look at. They look like a tiny Chihuahua with featherless wings. To me, they are little vampires that we allow to live among us.
I won’t lie to you; my first instinct was to kill it. However, I was quickly informed that it is illegal to kill a bat. Who would make up that law? It wasn’t like I could shoot it anyway since it was attached to the inside of my dangling canister light. I guess I technically could, but that would probably cause more handy work for me which I don’t much like doing…and there’s that problem of legality. Instead, I settled for my garbage picker upper. What is that you might ask? Well, it’s one of those things that has the claw on the end and a trigger thingamajig on the other end. I use it to pick up trash that jack wagons throw out in my yard.
I gently reached up with the picker and grabbed the vampire from inside the canister light. He, of course, freaked out and went to flapping his ugly wings and making some kind of clicking noise. He was also drooling like crazy which really freaked me out. I just knew this joker had rabies and was going to kill us all. I’m telling you I can’t stand them. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to kill anything worse than I wanted to kill that bat. I’m pretty sure my body was in fight or flight mode. Reluctantly, I took the bat into the woods behind the house. I don’t know what happened to him, but I really do hope our resident hawk got a rabies infused meal out of it.
I know that bats eat a ton of bugs. And Lord knows we’ve got enough mosquitoes to feed an entire bat army. A bat army, that just sounds like pure hell to me. Anyway, that’s my critter story for the week. Now, we’ve got every light in the house off and the blinds down to see if more show up. For what reason, I don’t know why. I think we should have that dangling canister light running 24/7.
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