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Foreclosed Home In Georgia Becomes Home To 20,000 Bats
Vacant, foreclosed homes come with a boatload of problems – the people who were forced out, the neighborhoods left with an empty house ripe for vandalism, the real estate agents trying to unload the home in a struggling market.
And West Michigan has had its share of foreclosures.
But if local home has experienced this particular problem, we haven't heard about it: Bats.
Not just a few bats – 10,000 to 20,000 bats.
That's the number of Mexican free-tailed bats that took up residence in a vacant, foreclosed home in the historic district of Tifton, Ga., according to the Tifton Gazette.
Bat excrement, or guano, is toxic. The home has so much of it that neighbors can smell it, a code enforcer declared the home unfit for human habitation, and a worker with an animal removal service called it “a cocktail of pathogens.”
While the Georgia company charged with removing the bats, has quite a challenge ahead, the neighbors are going to have their own problems. The company planned to seal the home and install one-way exit points that bar re-entry, according to the paper.
When they come back from feeding, they will have nowhere to go.
"They will have to find somewhere else quickly or they will die,” a worker told the paper, warning neighbors to make sure their homes are sealed.
Don VandenBos, who has operated Critter Control in Grand Rapids for more than 20 years, said foreclosures give him plenty of business, but so far none involving bats.
"That species of bats (in Georgia) is more colonial than the ones we have,” VandenBos said, adding Michigan sees mostly big brown bats and little brown bats. “Granted, we can get large colonies, but it's very unusual.”
He has seen some bat infestations “where we've got bat guano ankle deep and then some,” he said, but not in a foreclosed or abandoned house.
"I'm sure it will show up eventually,” he said. “Everything shows up in vacant and foreclosed homes. We get everything from squirrels and raccoons to abandoned cats."
“Every vacant house is a house that animals are going to find sooner or later.”
Credits: By Cami Reister - The Grand Rapids Press
