Millions of bats invade small US town
Pastor Dale Morgan
Millions of bats invade small US town*
01.11.2006
Source: pravda.ru
Such a large plague of bats has infested the town's historic district
that the sky turns black with each sunset and the neighborhood is
calling on Batman to come to the rescue.
That's what the local bat remover goes by. George Perkins often makes
public appearances in the caped crusader's costume and drives his own
Batmobile - a retro-styled Chrysler Prowler with bat emblems.
The bat-weary residents of Americus aren't laughing. The Georgia
Department of Natural Resources has proposed a long-term plan that
includes surveying the bat population, possibly training city workers to
do bat removals for needy homeowners and building bat houses in safe
areas where the flying mammals can continue providing environmental
benefits without being a nuisance.
"They're perpetual crap machines," said Tripp Pomeroy, who moved to the
town of 17,000 in 1989 to work for Habitat for Humanity, which has its
global headquarters here.
Pomeroy, now the co-owner of a fair-trade, organic coffee company known
as Cafe Campesino, said he's spent $1,500 trying to evict bats from the
attic of his 96-year-old traditional Southern home. Because of the
health risks, he's reluctant to let his children sleep in their upstairs
bedrooms.
Millions of bats - the leading cause of human rabies in the U.S. - have
moved into the attics of Antebellum and Greek Revival mansions built in
the 1800s and Victorian homes from the early 1900s in Americus' historic
district covering about a third of the town's 10 square miles.
The bats swarm out in the evening and perform a community service by
eating mosquitoes, gnats and other pests from twilight to dawn. Then, as
the sun begins to rise, they head back to their dark attic lairs, where
they urinate and leave piles of smelly guano.
Residents can't kill the bats because they are protected under Georgia
law, like chipmunks and other non-game animals. Killing one carries a
penalty of up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
So they try to exclude them by plugging openings in their homes, a
difficult task since bats can squeeze through holes as small as a dime.
Those who can afford professional help, send a distress signal to Perkins.
Perkins scampers up ladders with tubes of sealer and wire mesh to plug
holes and create one-way doors that let the bats out, but not back in.
He also crawls into attics with the bats. Once, he found a layer of
guano 8 inches deep.
From 1990 to 2005, 31 of the 39 cases of human rabies were linked to
rabies, making them the leading rabies threat to humans, according to
the Atlanta-based federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Because bats have tiny teeth that don't leave obvious punctures, people
may not even realize they've been bitten. Humans also can get rabies
from a scratch or contact with bat saliva.
The disease usually kills animals and humans within 10 days, unless they
get anti-rabies shots. In humans, that means six shots given over 30 days.
Source: The AP
Prepared by Alexander Timoshik
Pravda.ru