Honey-do turns me to Batman

My wife and I own an old building we use an office. It’s a brick and block structure that was built in 1915 as the Malta telephone building. After the phone company moved on, it was used as a church and later a flower shop.

When we bought the place there were inspirational phrases written on the walls inside, and two wooden signs, advertising flowers, were affixed to the outside of the building.

We long ago repainted the inside and I’d been meaning to remove the signs on the outside for years. I started to take them down two summers ago, but stopped when a guy who works next door told me there were bats behind the signs.

It was as good an excuse as any to put off until later what I didn’t really want to do that day.

The bats here are part of a colony that summers in Malta and winters in caves in the Little Rocky Mountains.

If I waited until fall to remove the signs, the bats would be gone.

I put off the job for the time being and forgot about it for a year and a half until last week when Barb reminded me it remained on my list of chores.

I couldn’t think of a good excuse to put the job off any longer and it was too early for the bats to have returned to town. Or so I thought.

With tools in hand, I climbed an extension ladder up to the sign on the south side of the building and removed the four screws that held it in place.

When it swung free I heard a scream. Barb, watching from below hollered “Look out!”

My view was blocked by the sign I was balancing on the ladder, but as I descended, I could see a wad of bats clinging to the side of the building. A few of them lost their grip and fell past me to the ground.

Since moving to Malta eight years ago I’ve become accustomed to bats. They still get into the house, though less often now than when we first arrived.

They still creep me out a bit, but I’ve become a fan of little brown myotis. A single bat can eat 1,200 mosquito-sized insects in an hour.

The bats that had fallen to the ground were apparently too cold to fly so I found a small cardboard box to put them in and took them down to the park and released them on a cottonwood tree. Three of them scrambled up the trunk. The fourth, warmed by the sun, took flight and quickly disappeared.

By the time I got back to the office the wad of bats was gone and there were none behind the other sign.

There a good chance, however, that I’ll see them again this summer. I just hope it’s not in the house.

Parker Heinlein is at

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