Going batty at the Pilot

I'm not a big fan of bats. The truth is, they freak me out big time.

So imagine my trepidation last summer when I and the rest of the Whitefish Pilot staff discovered we have a colony of bats — seasonal residents — living in the sliver of space between the Pilot's carport and the Valley Glass building.

At first, we didn't know what was leaving the generous amount of droppings along the side of the building. We put out mouse traps, to no avail. Then someone suggested it might be rats, because the droppings seemed larger than what mice might produce.

Stumped about what creatures were roaming out back, we called the pest management guy.

"You've got bats," he declared.

"Eeeeeewwwwwww," I said.

They won't hurt a thing, he assured. In fact, they keep the mosquito population down. (A single little brown bat can eat as many as 600 small insects in an hour.) Oh, and the "guano" makes good fertilizer, he added.

By the end of September, they'll be out of here, he said. Local bats apparently winter in porous cliffs around Flathead Lake.

My first thought was to dispose of the critters, exterminate them, trap them, whatever…just get them out of here. Maybe it was all those "Dark Shadows" episodes my brother and I watched as kids. The "bats are evil because they turn into vampires" thing. O.K., I don't believe in vampires, but bats are still creepy in my book, and I wanted them gone. And lately, reports of rabid bats in Columbia Falls have made me even more nervous.

We decided last year that once the bats had flown south for the winter, we'd seal off the thin space where they hang upside down during the day. They'd be forced to relocate, and we'd be rid of them. But that didn't get done, so the bats are back again this summer. Luckily, I've never seen them actually flying around. But if you press your face against the west wall of the Valley Glass building and look up, you can see them hanging there during the afternoons.

We've got the same game plan for this fall, to seal off the area. But now it turns out we should be thankful for the little guys, our general manager, Rena Tintinger, says.

She was visiting with her sister from Canada, who said that in China, bats are considered "really, really, good chi."

"Tell them not to kill them! That would be really bad chi," the sister advised.

Chi, as defined by Webster, is "vital energy that is held to animate the body internally and is of central importance in some Eastern systems of medical treatment (as acupuncture) and of exercise or self defense (as tai chi)."

Ooooooo-kaaaaaaay, a little too touchy-feely for me, but, whatever.

"I thought you guys should know just how fortunate you are having bats that choose your newspaper year after year," our general manager e-mailed me. "People in China would give their eye teeth for this kind of chi!"

Maybe we could hire a bat man (yes, there is such a profession) to trap them, and export them to China, where they'll all find good homes.

Lynnette Hintze is the editor of the Whitefish Pilot.