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Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to another episode with midway pest management. I am your host Luis Gonzalez. And today I have a very interesting topic we’re going to talk about Bats. And the goal of this podcast is to educate you on the common bats that we have here in Kansas, some do’s and don’ts and kind of how to identify if you’re having Bats, there’s a lot of signs audible, and then evidence that bad sleep behind that can quickly make you realize that you’re having a bad issue. So I’ll go ahead and get started and explain some of those things. So as a service, wildlife control service provider, we deal with bats, literally on a daily basis. And there’s a common trend associated with bats. And I want to educate you on how to see if you actually do have bats, or if it might potentially be another type of wildlife or, you know, they easily get confused for mice and rats as well. So what’s the most common call that we have, whenever they’re requesting whenever customers are requesting service, so we’ll get customers contact the office, and they’ll let us know that they’re hearing noises, usually on the wall or in the ceiling. And, you know, one of the things associated with bats is whenever we hear noises, remember, they have their wings, and they’re crawling around. So it kind of sounds like a fluttering noise. And usually, it’s going to be in a localized spot, and usually is going to be an exterior wall. Because they’re coming in from the exterior, usually they land on the roof, they crawl into a soffit eave, or they’ll linger around that wall void cavity close to the exterior. One of the things that is really noticeable with bats is they usually start to become active in the evening hours. And then depending on weather temperatures, they may become active, you know, early evening, five o’clock, six, seven o’clock, we typically see the most activity at about 9pm 10pm timeframe, where they become audibly active. And what I mean by that is they start to make a lot of squeaky noises, and then they start fluttering. And moving around, you’ll hear a lot of scratching, the scratching noises that the bats make is actually pretty loud. Whereas if there was a mouse, typically, it’s very faint, the noises they make, and only like in the middle of the night when the house is quiet when you know, dogs are not barking, kids are not running around, you don’t hear all the white noise from the outside from the vehicles. That’s usually when you’re, you’re gonna hear a mouse in the wall. Whereas bad you’ll hear him throughout the day, you know, middle of the afternoon, all of a sudden you’re working and you hear something up above, you know that that loudness is indicative of a bad whereas again, if it was a mouse you typically would not hear during the day like that. Bats are active all throughout the night. And we’ll we’ll see them kind of wake up throughout the day and start making noise. And that’s, that’s pretty common depending on the temperatures. One of the things that you as a homeowner can do is if you do a walk around your home, and you look up on the roof, and usually where there’s eave, there’ll be an opening. And usually these eaves, they have a piece of sheet metal flashing that runs across it about 11 inches or so and it’s tucked in right into the roof. A lot of times whenever houses are built these pieces of sheet metal they’re not properly secure and they tend to fall off over time. And then when they were they fall off, they leave a big big opening and usually that opening is just a sliver about an inch by about 11 inches in width. Or sometimes we may have those pieces of sheet metal secured in place. But then the edges have gaps large enough where bats can enter the attic. Attics are the most common places for Bad’s and then the second common place is going to be chimneys. If that chimney has not properly cab, sometimes we’ll have bats come in through the chimney and then eventually they can figure out their way into the house and then that’s when we have incidents where bats are flying inside at home. Okay, so other things you can look for if you look up on the roof and you do find these gaps assuming that you have been hearing noises look for signs. We’re looking for insulation a lot of times these bats will sneak into the attic and in that process they bring particles of insulation out of the attic so we have you know yellow fiberglass insulation we have why fiberglass insulation we have cellulose material insulation that is more like a grayish color. Look for those particles up on the roof or even in the gutter or say that we got heavy rains, where that gutter spout comes down into the ground look to see if there’s any evidence have insulation and also there’s going to be accumulations of droppings and droppings kind of look like mouse droppings, except they’re much larger, let’s just say about quarter inch to half inch, and they’re very rough and texture was a mouse tends to be soft and looks more like a grain of rice. Bad bad droppings are going to be a little bit longer and very jagged, very rough. Look for those down in the gutter spouts. You can look them up. If there’s a large colony you’ll see them accumulating on the roof. So just pay attention to that. And then if you need assistance to identify if it is bad, say that you’re not sure but you’re hearing noises. Remember, we’re dealing with with wildlife here or small rodents. So it may not necessarily be bats, it could potentially be a squirrel, it could potentially be a mouse or a rat or the noises. Something else so professional assistance to identify goes a long ways with is our process here at Medway pest management or what most Wildlife Control Operators will do is they’ll want to do an inspection of the attic of the insulation. One, there’s a benefit to that because you actually can see the guano the bad droppings overtop on the insulation, making it very obvious to tell if there is an active bad infestation inside inside the attic. The other thing is that as a wildlife control operator, we’re also going to be looking at the condition of the insulation. Sometimes you have a large colony that really saturates the insulation with bad urine and bad guano. And that could pose a significant health hazard to you and your family or anybody who’s living inside that dwelling. So, key things whenever midway management comes out there we’re looking at the outside of the house, we’re looking for any gaps along the gutter along the eaves and events. That chimney where the chimney break, the veneer of the chimney meets the siding, sometimes there scab so we’re looking at all of that to see if there’s any entry points where bats can come in. Now we’ll narrow it down and say that that house only has two entry points. Then at that point we’ll proceed with installing exclusion devices. This is to humanely evict the bats from inside the attic or inside wherever they are whether this the chimney or in the walls, we want to humanely evict them. Midway pest management will do the inspection to determine entry points and they will also want to do an inspection on the inside of the attic. Again, this is just to determine if there is bats in fact, or if it’s another small rodents or other wildlife causing the problem, assuming it’s bad, so we’re looking at the condition of the insulation to see how soiled it is. And then at that point, we can make recommendations to clean your attic, either a spot sanitation or a full attic remediation. In some cases, there’s just too much contamination. To try to spot cleaning the best solution is to just remove all of the insulation and replace it with clean new insulation. Anyways, I hope that you have found this video helpful. There is so much more I can go into about bads. And for that I do invite you to call us our phone number is 913-820-9737 and if you have a specific question that you want me to answer, I would be more than happy to speak with you again. I am your host today Luis Gonzalez. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode I’m bads and we’re going to be launching more videos regarding other wildlife so stay tuned for more. Thanks for watching and I wish you a wonderful day.