Winged mammals take over attic, displace homeowner

BIG LAKE — When the first little brown bat entered her living room three years ago, she laughed that it was simply a sign of good luck.

“My mother was a traditional Irish woman who’d view the strangest things as good omens,” Julie Busch said Thursday while visiting her custom log home off Musk Ox Street in Big Lake. “We were so nice to that bat, being careful not to harm it after we’d heard how beneficial they are and how good their guano is for plants. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have killed every last one of those suckers!”

More than $50,000 in abatement costs and re-roofing expenses later, the former UAA reading professor hopes her story will serve as a cautionary tale for other homeowners oblivious to the destruction the furry winged mammals can cause.

Busch, who’s lived in the home with her husband, Greg, for 19 years, had no idea the seemingly harmless bat was only one of more than two dozen that had formed a seasonal colony beneath her warm, metal roof, snuggling among the insulation and feeding upon a bounty of bugs in her apple orchard.

Two years ago, she began hearing what sounded like “shuffling cards,” low clicking noises and high-pitched screeches that forced her to turn up the volume on the television just to drown it out.

“It was driving me crazy!” she said. “My husband couldn’t hear the noises as well, so he thought I was just imagining them.”

They finally called the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Cooperative Extension office, which referred them to Robert Doran, owner of the private Wasilla company Nuisance Wildlife Management.

“Robert was such a wealth of knowledge,” she said. “He walked around the outside and pointed out the droppings on the side of the house, which indicated to him we probably had a few bats in the roof. He suggested ways we could plug the holes and put up a metal mesh that would serve as a one-way trap door.”

With the help of a neighbor who’d also noticed a few bats around his home, they climbed on the roof and tried to fix the problem themselves, but the following spring the bats were back.

When a building inspector used a thermal imaging unit inside the home, outlines of the little critters could be seen inside the drywall and roofing material.

“It was very creepy, very creepy indeed,” said Busch, a military spouse who’d never heard of bats even existing in Alaska. “I ended up living in my camper in the driveway because I just knew I’d wake up and find a bat crawling on me.”

After learning their homeowners insurance would cover most of the costs of ridding their home of the bats and making sure they didn’t come back, they hired Doran and Wasilla roofer Chris Halverson of Halverson’s Quality Roofing.

Doran stressed they never kill the bats — they simply displace them and seal every hole and seam bigger than a quarter-inch to keep them from coming back.

“I’m actually a big fan of bats,” Doran said while taking a break from his roofing work at the Busch home Wednesday. “They’re amazing. They’re super talented and super beneficial. They eat a tremendous amount of mosquitoes, like half their body weight in a short amount of time. They’re fast and they can turn on a dime. But they’re still very mysterious. We don’t know why they migrate to Alaska and we don’t know where they go in the wintertime. We call them ‘Alaska’s mystery mammal.’”

Doran has sent dead bats to UAF scholars and state Department of Fish and Game biologists to help solve those puzzles.

In the meantime, the painstaking, tedious work to rid them from the Busch home involved peeling back the old roof and, in some cases, chiseling insulation materials that had become fused together after the home’s builder added on two upper sections years ago.

But that was only the beginning of what had at first seemed to be a typical bat abatement job.

“This is honestly the first case where we’ve been able to take the roof off and see everything,” said Doran, who has worked in wildlife management for the past nine years and has been on many calls in the Valley and Anchorage involving bats, squirrels and pigeons. “I’ve always told people it takes a lot of bats over a long period of time to do significant damage, but I’m actually reassessing that now. I’ve seen less than 20 bats come out of this home and yet the amount of droppings we found indicates their colony was probably more active than we first thought. It was pretty bad, several inches deep.”

As he and Halverson began peeling back the metal roof and the first layer of building materials, the bats would quickly scurry under the next layer.

When they’d pull up the next section of roof, the bats would disappear under another section, Doran said.

“When we finally got to the last panel and pulled that one off and the sunlight hit the bats, it took them a few minutes, but then they took off and didn’t come back,” he said.

For the past couple of weeks, Busch has stayed with her daughter or in a hotel in Anchorage while her husband has remained in the house to take care of their dog.

“I stayed in the house for the first nine days, but the noise from all the workers just got to be too much,” Busch said. “So I figured this would be a good time to take a little vacation from work.”

At the height of the abatement, there were three people from Nuisance Wildlife Management and three from Halverson’s Quality Roofing.

At one point during the removal of the contaminated insulation, Doran’s crew wore light Tyvek suits complete with gas masks to prevent skin and lung exposure to the droppings and other potentially harmful materials released into the air.

A total of 3,000 square feet of roofing is being replaced at the same time Doran assists with sealing every nook and cranny with a special copper fiber mixture specifically designed to deter bats.

“Bats can squeeze into any opening the size of a No. 2 pencil or bigger, so it takes a long time to make sure everything’s plugged,” Doran said.

Halverson said he’s done a lot of cold roof conversions before, but never one that coincided with bats.

“Normally you don’t worry about the tiny holes, but when bats are involved, you worry about them all,” said Halverson, who hopes to collaborate with Doran on other roofing projects in the future. “Robert’s been great to work with. I’ve learned a lot about bats I never knew before.”

Busch said she hopes to be back in her home in the next few days, enjoying the peace and quiet of a summer day off Big Lake Lodge Road — bat free.

“If I never see another bat again it will be too soon,” she laughed.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.