Bats

The morning after writing the post about feeling safe in Villa Jati, I pulled out of our driveway on the motorbike to find a man leaning against our wall with a rifle firing into the coconut trees.

Several local boys were at the entrance.  One was holding something but I couldn't tell what.  He held out his hand to reveal bats held together with string. 

I later asked Putu why there was a man with a rifle next to our house.  The man with the rifle, Putu said, was shooting at bats in the coconut trees and the boys were collecting the ones he shot.  Putu added the villagers will eat bat, squirrel and pigeon mixed together, and that it is delicious.

Last night in bed, about a week after encountering the boys with the bats, I heard a sound and looked down to see a bat dragging itself across our bedroom floor.  The bat then fluttered around the room before settling in the wooden beams in the peaked part of the ceiling high above our bed.  Lynn has a special fondness for bats due to their mosquito-eating ways, but quickly moved to the guest bedroom.  I stuck around to read up on bats.  I got to the part about how bats that fly slowly or appear sickly might be rabid, and quickly hightailed it to the guest bedroom too.

This morning I looked for the bat but couldn't find it.  Putu looked for the bat but couldn't find it.  He figured it must have gotten out somehow even though the door had been shut.

This afternoon I heard a high pitched chirping sound coming from the ceiling.  When I told Putu, he said it was a bat.

He looked at the ceiling again and found a spot of shadow high up in the ceiling beams directly above where I slept that was slightly darker than the rest of the shadow.  He said that was the bat.

He brought a ladder, and the pole from the pool cleaning tool, and eventually dislodged the bat.  It flew around before landing on the bottom of a curtain.  Putu went over and grabbed it with his bare hands.

He then went outside and released it.

Detail from photo above, the bat is in the center

An unappealing aspect of our new house was that every afternoon tiny hard poops mysteriously appeared on our clean white bedsheets- on my side of the bed.  I assumed it was gecko poop, like we had at Sanctuary (and like you see at all houses in Bali).  But after releasing the bat, Putu looked and said it was probably bat poop.

Lynn and I had assumed that the bat had flown into our room the night before.  But it had likely been living with us for a week or more, dangling above our heads during the day, and flying around our room at night.

I hope that's the last of the bats in our room.