Bat Exclusion via Cat-Guard is the Most Successful Way to Keep Bats Out of Your Home

Perhaps the most feared and avoided animal in nature, bats are certainly atop the list of unwanted houseguests.

Bats do not chew or claw their way into a structure, but instead, take advantage of structural openings or areas of disrepair on the outside of a building. Making their way indoors through small openings in home soffit, siding, and roofs, bats often roost (or hang out — literally) in attics, much like what happened in this Florida home.

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Although it is typically terrifying when you realize bats have been living in your home, bats are extremely important to our ecosystem and are a protected species as a result.

This means, while professionals want to remove bats from the homes of customers in need as soon as possible, Catseye must follow state and federal regulations to ensure bats are protected throughout the removal process.

As it currently stands, professional pest control teams have strict dates they can and cannot evict and exclude bats from homes and similar structures.

In Massachusetts, professionals are only able to evict bats during the early spring, during the month of May, or from the first of August to mid-October. The same rules apply for other areas of the Northeast like Connecticut and New York.

In Florida, fall and winter are the best seasons to have a professional exclude bats. From the first week of April to approximately the third week of July, bats in Florida reside in nursing colonies. Exclusion during this time would separate nursing mothers from their pups, causing major problems. Sealing their entry points or creating a one-way door would inevitably trap many of the bats, leaving the young bats to die. The odor from dead bats is very potent and permeating, it also attracts other bats, increasing the bat activity at your home.

Keep Bats Away for Good

Our Cat-Guard exclusion team will perform any necessary seal-ups on the exterior of your home, as well as install a bat cone or “excluder.”. Acting as a one-way bat door, the bats can safely fly out of the cone, but are unable to fly back in.

As a mammal that is unable to fly the same way birds do, bats need to glide onto a landing spot and crawl in to make it indoors. Specifically designed for this reason, one-way bat doors make it impossible for bats to get back inside since they are unable to crawl up the cone and back into your home.

Once the one-way bat door is installed, the bats can naturally exit the home through the excluder. After determining the bats are no longer roosting in your home, our staff will remove the excluder, clean up the bat droppings and urine, and seal the hole to prevent any future problems.

Bat Mating Season & Bat Exclusion

Although it’s a natural and effective way to remove bats, federal and state regulations prevent us from doing so during the mating season. Running from June through July, mating season allows us to perform minor seal-ups only.

During this time, we perform a 90-percent seal of your home, leaving only one or two entry points for the bats to exit naturally. This is important to understand, since sealing every entry point would result in trapping the bats inside your home. Once trapped, the bats would either enter the living space of the home or die and rot away, causing your home to smell like dead animals.

Once bat maternity season is over, our team will return to install an excluder in order to permanently remove the bats from your home. Any damage caused by the bats will be repaired, and any areas with droppings or urine will be cleaned and disinfected.

Shortly after the eviction process is completed, you may continue to see bats flying above your home. Don’t be alarmed; they are simply looking for the entry points and will move on once they’ve realized the home is now sealed.

We understand bats are the last thing you want to share your home with — and it’s our job to make sure bats aren’t moving in and terrorizing your home — but we also need to respect the regulations protecting these protected species.

At Catseye, we will never intentionally harm or kill bats, however, we will make sure the bats are evicted as soon as we are legally able to do so.

If you are experiencing bats in the home, contact us for a free inspection today.