Post by L Roebuck on Sept 22, 2005 18:51:57 GMT -5
Posted on Thu, Sep. 22, 2005
A real Batman
Who ya' gonna call? George Perkins can help you with any bat problems you may have
BY ANNIE ADDINGTON Staff Writer
When Amy Garwich-Cioppa bought her historic house in Lumpkin, Ga., in the spring, she knew there were some bats living in the eaves outside the home. But she said the seller had agreed to remove a couple dozen of the winged mammals from the attic before the closing.
But when Garwich-Cioppa spent her first night in the house, built in 1885, it was evident that she had company. As she tried to sleep she heard the chittering and scratching of bats. And as she worked to restore the house, she encountered bat droppings -- or guano -- seeping out from within the walls and closets throughout the house.
So she asked around and called the one man to the rescue who seemed up to the task: a 56-year-old who answers to the name of "Batman." George Perkins, of Eufaula, Ala., is a lover of bats who dons his batman costume and rides in his bat mobile for parades and community events.
But when it comes to bats inside people's homes, Perkins smells danger -- even if so many years of dealing with bats and their guano have just about killed his sense of smell. When Perkins, owner of Bat Busters, visited Garwich-Cioppa's home in Lumpkin, he knew he had an unusually tough case on his hands.
"Any place there was a crack no bigger than my little finger, they were coming in. That place was eaten alive," Perkins said.
Attic colony
He estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 bats were inhabiting the house. Perkins warned Garwich-Cioppa to move out of her house until he had tackled the problem -- and then he set about showing the bats to the door.
After installing one-way traps that let bats out of the house but block their re-entry, he suggested that Garwich-Cioppa come over to her home at dusk to watch her attic residents take flight.
Garwich-Cioppa was shaken by the sight.
"There were bats flying everywhere, swooping down beside me as I was sitting in my driveway literally crying because this is what I was living in," she said. "I was scared to death."
Much of the fear came from the prospect that either she or her 14-year-old son, Christopher, could contract histoplasmosis from the bat guano or rabies from a rabid bat. For homeowners under normal circumstances -- with a few bats in their attic -- the prospects of contracting either disease are extremely slim.
Only one U.S. death per year is attributed to bat rabies, according to Bat Conservation International, and relatively few people, even among those exposed to bat guano, contract histoplasmosis -- although there is potential risk of infection to anyone removing guano, as spores are released by disturbance.
But with thousands of bats, the risk felt real to both Perkins and Garwich-Cioppa. She and her son went to Martin Army Community Hospital for a battery of tests and lung X-rays to make sure they hadn't already developed health problems.
They received clear bills of health, and now, thanks to Perkins, they live in a bat-free house -- although not a guano-free one. Garwich-Cioppa expects the cleanup effort to stretch on for several months to come.
Beneficial mammals
Horror stories like hers are an exception to the rule when it comes to bats. In fact the little mammals that become dangerous pests inside a person's home, can be man's best friend outdoors.
Without bats, Perkins said, humans would have to use chemical pesticides at levels nearly toxic to themselves.
"They balance the world," Perkins said of the animals he gets paid to shoo off. "They eat about 2,000 insects a night. Without the bats we couldn't live here."
That's part of the reason that Perkins is a bat evictor -- not an exterminator.
Poisons used against bats also pose serious health hazards for humans and make it more likely that people will come into contact with sick bats. And with more than half of American bat species in severe decline or already listed as endangered, according to Bat Conservation International, it's illegal to kill some of them anyway.
It's this recognition of bats as crucial to ecosystem health that has helped fuel a friendship between Perkins -- batman and bat evictor -- and Vicky Beckham Smith, a Eufaula-based wildlife educator who answers to the name of "bat lady."
Smith has state permits to keep three non-releasable native bats in a cage in her laundry room. A big brown bat, Count Echo, and two Mexican freetail bats --Miguel Roberto and Juan Haraja -- bring Smith's school presentations to life.
Smith often talks bats with Perkins, mining him for information about what he's seen on his latest jobs.
Housing bats
Smith said Alabama has 15 species of bat and Georgia has 16, some of which are federally endangered. While homeowners should be vigilant about keeping bats out of their homes, they should be welcomed -- from a distance -- as backyard residents, Smith said.
For suburban dwellers who don't have many trees to provide bat habitat, Smith recommends erecting a bat house.
"I think it's a wonderful idea," she said. "Who wouldn't like to have natural pest control?"
Perkins cautions bat house builders to build a fence around the bat house if children may come near it (to avoid exposure to bat guano) and to teach children the dangers of handling bats.
Meanwhile it's important to keep bats in their bat house -- or in natural outdoor roosting places -- rather than in your house.
Bats can enter through openings as small as one-half inch in diameter. Common points of entry include open windows or doors, broken or poorly-fitted screens, loose or missing shingles or tiles, and places where siding forms corners or meets windows or doors or where pipes or wiring enter buildings.
When Perkins arrives in his Bat Busters truck (he saves his sporty bat mobile for parades and other diplomatic bat roles) he begins installing a variety of exclusion devices, including PVC pipes with an open-toed sock on the end that prevents bats from re-entering.
For Garwich-Cioppa's house he did some preliminary in-house bat removal as well. He spent several late-night hours collecting bats to bring outside. He sucked the bats up with a commercial sized Shop-Vac, shot them back out unharmed into a trash bag and carried them downstairs in plastic tubs.
While Garwich-Cioppa knows on an intellectual level that bats work wonders for the environment, for now she is haunted by the sight and sound of them -- indoors or out.
Perkins treated the guano and bat urine on the walls of her home with a chemical to kill germs and help begin to neutralize the smell. But every day, Garwich-Cioppa devotes more time to cleaning bat guano off the walls or from behind outlet covers or inside closets. The dust of the long-dry guano makes the task all the more unbearable.
"As soon as I'm around it, my lungs hurt," Garwich-Cioppa said. "I shouldn't have to worry about cleaning my son's room with a mask on my face."
Reclaiming a bat cave
Perkins has done similar work cleaning and restoring homes that were once bat-infested. He lives part time in a large 1840s-era house in Eufaula that he calls "Bat Cave 1." It's not the first bat house he's ever resurrected -- but it ranks supreme in terms of number of bats that once called it home. And it has a very grim history.
In the early 1990s a woman who worked in the house died after a contact with a bat that had rabies. University of Auburn officials later estimated that 50,000 bats were inhabiting the house, Perkins said.
Eufaula officials were struggling with how to deal with a house listed on the National Register of Historic Places but also occupied by an estimated 50,000 bats and haunted by tragedy. Finally, in 1994, Perkins offered to purchase the house, rid it of its bats and bat residue, and make a home of it for himself.
Eufaula City Councilman Bob Powers said before Perkins arrived on the scene, officials from Auburn University and local and state health agencies were struggling with what to do about the house.
"There was a quandary for months; it wasn't a quick solution," Powers said. "He went in and got the bats out and all the sudden he had a reputation for being able to get bats out."
Powers said Perkins has made many a historic home in Eufaula inhabitable, or simply more comfortable, with his bat-shooing tactics.
Now Perkins has filled his West Broadway "bat cave" with hundreds of bat figurines, miniature bat mobiles, hanging bats, and batman blankets, posters, and banners, including a large banner that reads: "Welcome Home Batman" in his intensely bat-themed "bat room."
Do not touch
As much as Perkins loves bats and playing the role of batman, he is most concerned with spreading the message that wild bats, when handled by humans, can be fatally dangerous.
Perkins, who has done thousands of bat exclusion jobs -- some of them for large companies in other parts of the country -- has only been bitten once. He blames himself because he was aggravating a bat that he was trying to evict -- but he paid the price of a bite to the neck. Perkins took antibiotics as a precaution, and he gets regular screenings by his doctor to be sure he hasn't contracted any diseases.
If you see a bat by day, Perkins said, it is probably rabid -- and all bat handling should be left to gloved experts.
"They're great little animals to have, but in the wrong place, they'll kill you," he said.
Meanwhile Garwich-Cioppa cautions home buyers to ask for an extensive inspection that includes a thorough bat check in the attic before making an offer.
"I honestly believe it should be a part of the inspection regardless of the age of the home," she said. "If I had known then what I knew two months after buying the house I never would have bought it."
Contact Annie Addington
at (706) 494-6663 or aaddington@ledger-enquirer.com
BAT FACTS
• More than 1,100 species of bats account for almost a quarter of all mammal species, and most are highly beneficial.
• A single little brown bat can catch 1,200 mosquito-sized insects in just one hour.
• Bat rabies accounts for approximately one human death per year in the United States. Careless handling is the primary source of rabies exposure from bats.
• Bats that can be caught are most likely sick and they should not be handled.
• Contrary to popular misconception, bats are not blind, do not become entangled in human hair and seldom transmit disease to other animals or humans.
• More than 50 percent of American bat species are in severe decline or are already listed as endangered. Bats are vulnerable to extinction in part because they are the slowest reproducing mammals on earth for their size, most producing only one pup annually.
• A bat's body is best adapted for hanging upside down. Its hind limbs have rotated 180 degrees so that its knees face backwards. Bats have specialized tendons that hold their toes in place so that they are able to cling to their roosts without expending any energy.
A real Batman
Who ya' gonna call? George Perkins can help you with any bat problems you may have
BY ANNIE ADDINGTON Staff Writer
When Amy Garwich-Cioppa bought her historic house in Lumpkin, Ga., in the spring, she knew there were some bats living in the eaves outside the home. But she said the seller had agreed to remove a couple dozen of the winged mammals from the attic before the closing.
But when Garwich-Cioppa spent her first night in the house, built in 1885, it was evident that she had company. As she tried to sleep she heard the chittering and scratching of bats. And as she worked to restore the house, she encountered bat droppings -- or guano -- seeping out from within the walls and closets throughout the house.
So she asked around and called the one man to the rescue who seemed up to the task: a 56-year-old who answers to the name of "Batman." George Perkins, of Eufaula, Ala., is a lover of bats who dons his batman costume and rides in his bat mobile for parades and community events.
But when it comes to bats inside people's homes, Perkins smells danger -- even if so many years of dealing with bats and their guano have just about killed his sense of smell. When Perkins, owner of Bat Busters, visited Garwich-Cioppa's home in Lumpkin, he knew he had an unusually tough case on his hands.
"Any place there was a crack no bigger than my little finger, they were coming in. That place was eaten alive," Perkins said.
Attic colony
He estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 bats were inhabiting the house. Perkins warned Garwich-Cioppa to move out of her house until he had tackled the problem -- and then he set about showing the bats to the door.
After installing one-way traps that let bats out of the house but block their re-entry, he suggested that Garwich-Cioppa come over to her home at dusk to watch her attic residents take flight.
Garwich-Cioppa was shaken by the sight.
"There were bats flying everywhere, swooping down beside me as I was sitting in my driveway literally crying because this is what I was living in," she said. "I was scared to death."
Much of the fear came from the prospect that either she or her 14-year-old son, Christopher, could contract histoplasmosis from the bat guano or rabies from a rabid bat. For homeowners under normal circumstances -- with a few bats in their attic -- the prospects of contracting either disease are extremely slim.
Only one U.S. death per year is attributed to bat rabies, according to Bat Conservation International, and relatively few people, even among those exposed to bat guano, contract histoplasmosis -- although there is potential risk of infection to anyone removing guano, as spores are released by disturbance.
But with thousands of bats, the risk felt real to both Perkins and Garwich-Cioppa. She and her son went to Martin Army Community Hospital for a battery of tests and lung X-rays to make sure they hadn't already developed health problems.
They received clear bills of health, and now, thanks to Perkins, they live in a bat-free house -- although not a guano-free one. Garwich-Cioppa expects the cleanup effort to stretch on for several months to come.
Beneficial mammals
Horror stories like hers are an exception to the rule when it comes to bats. In fact the little mammals that become dangerous pests inside a person's home, can be man's best friend outdoors.
Without bats, Perkins said, humans would have to use chemical pesticides at levels nearly toxic to themselves.
"They balance the world," Perkins said of the animals he gets paid to shoo off. "They eat about 2,000 insects a night. Without the bats we couldn't live here."
That's part of the reason that Perkins is a bat evictor -- not an exterminator.
Poisons used against bats also pose serious health hazards for humans and make it more likely that people will come into contact with sick bats. And with more than half of American bat species in severe decline or already listed as endangered, according to Bat Conservation International, it's illegal to kill some of them anyway.
It's this recognition of bats as crucial to ecosystem health that has helped fuel a friendship between Perkins -- batman and bat evictor -- and Vicky Beckham Smith, a Eufaula-based wildlife educator who answers to the name of "bat lady."
Smith has state permits to keep three non-releasable native bats in a cage in her laundry room. A big brown bat, Count Echo, and two Mexican freetail bats --Miguel Roberto and Juan Haraja -- bring Smith's school presentations to life.
Smith often talks bats with Perkins, mining him for information about what he's seen on his latest jobs.
Housing bats
Smith said Alabama has 15 species of bat and Georgia has 16, some of which are federally endangered. While homeowners should be vigilant about keeping bats out of their homes, they should be welcomed -- from a distance -- as backyard residents, Smith said.
For suburban dwellers who don't have many trees to provide bat habitat, Smith recommends erecting a bat house.
"I think it's a wonderful idea," she said. "Who wouldn't like to have natural pest control?"
Perkins cautions bat house builders to build a fence around the bat house if children may come near it (to avoid exposure to bat guano) and to teach children the dangers of handling bats.
Meanwhile it's important to keep bats in their bat house -- or in natural outdoor roosting places -- rather than in your house.
Bats can enter through openings as small as one-half inch in diameter. Common points of entry include open windows or doors, broken or poorly-fitted screens, loose or missing shingles or tiles, and places where siding forms corners or meets windows or doors or where pipes or wiring enter buildings.
When Perkins arrives in his Bat Busters truck (he saves his sporty bat mobile for parades and other diplomatic bat roles) he begins installing a variety of exclusion devices, including PVC pipes with an open-toed sock on the end that prevents bats from re-entering.
For Garwich-Cioppa's house he did some preliminary in-house bat removal as well. He spent several late-night hours collecting bats to bring outside. He sucked the bats up with a commercial sized Shop-Vac, shot them back out unharmed into a trash bag and carried them downstairs in plastic tubs.
While Garwich-Cioppa knows on an intellectual level that bats work wonders for the environment, for now she is haunted by the sight and sound of them -- indoors or out.
Perkins treated the guano and bat urine on the walls of her home with a chemical to kill germs and help begin to neutralize the smell. But every day, Garwich-Cioppa devotes more time to cleaning bat guano off the walls or from behind outlet covers or inside closets. The dust of the long-dry guano makes the task all the more unbearable.
"As soon as I'm around it, my lungs hurt," Garwich-Cioppa said. "I shouldn't have to worry about cleaning my son's room with a mask on my face."
Reclaiming a bat cave
Perkins has done similar work cleaning and restoring homes that were once bat-infested. He lives part time in a large 1840s-era house in Eufaula that he calls "Bat Cave 1." It's not the first bat house he's ever resurrected -- but it ranks supreme in terms of number of bats that once called it home. And it has a very grim history.
In the early 1990s a woman who worked in the house died after a contact with a bat that had rabies. University of Auburn officials later estimated that 50,000 bats were inhabiting the house, Perkins said.
Eufaula officials were struggling with how to deal with a house listed on the National Register of Historic Places but also occupied by an estimated 50,000 bats and haunted by tragedy. Finally, in 1994, Perkins offered to purchase the house, rid it of its bats and bat residue, and make a home of it for himself.
Eufaula City Councilman Bob Powers said before Perkins arrived on the scene, officials from Auburn University and local and state health agencies were struggling with what to do about the house.
"There was a quandary for months; it wasn't a quick solution," Powers said. "He went in and got the bats out and all the sudden he had a reputation for being able to get bats out."
Powers said Perkins has made many a historic home in Eufaula inhabitable, or simply more comfortable, with his bat-shooing tactics.
Now Perkins has filled his West Broadway "bat cave" with hundreds of bat figurines, miniature bat mobiles, hanging bats, and batman blankets, posters, and banners, including a large banner that reads: "Welcome Home Batman" in his intensely bat-themed "bat room."
Do not touch
As much as Perkins loves bats and playing the role of batman, he is most concerned with spreading the message that wild bats, when handled by humans, can be fatally dangerous.
Perkins, who has done thousands of bat exclusion jobs -- some of them for large companies in other parts of the country -- has only been bitten once. He blames himself because he was aggravating a bat that he was trying to evict -- but he paid the price of a bite to the neck. Perkins took antibiotics as a precaution, and he gets regular screenings by his doctor to be sure he hasn't contracted any diseases.
If you see a bat by day, Perkins said, it is probably rabid -- and all bat handling should be left to gloved experts.
"They're great little animals to have, but in the wrong place, they'll kill you," he said.
Meanwhile Garwich-Cioppa cautions home buyers to ask for an extensive inspection that includes a thorough bat check in the attic before making an offer.
"I honestly believe it should be a part of the inspection regardless of the age of the home," she said. "If I had known then what I knew two months after buying the house I never would have bought it."
Contact Annie Addington
at (706) 494-6663 or aaddington@ledger-enquirer.com
BAT FACTS
• More than 1,100 species of bats account for almost a quarter of all mammal species, and most are highly beneficial.
• A single little brown bat can catch 1,200 mosquito-sized insects in just one hour.
• Bat rabies accounts for approximately one human death per year in the United States. Careless handling is the primary source of rabies exposure from bats.
• Bats that can be caught are most likely sick and they should not be handled.
• Contrary to popular misconception, bats are not blind, do not become entangled in human hair and seldom transmit disease to other animals or humans.
• More than 50 percent of American bat species are in severe decline or are already listed as endangered. Bats are vulnerable to extinction in part because they are the slowest reproducing mammals on earth for their size, most producing only one pup annually.
• A bat's body is best adapted for hanging upside down. Its hind limbs have rotated 180 degrees so that its knees face backwards. Bats have specialized tendons that hold their toes in place so that they are able to cling to their roosts without expending any energy.