Case Study: Bat Removal in Newton Massachusetts
A typical large, old contemporary home near Newton center.
On Friday August 3rd 2007 we received a call from a woman in Newton Massachusetts. She told us that she had seen a bat in her home during the night. The bat had first showed up in her bedroom and then flew into the hallway and then into an empty bedroom. She closed to door to the bedroom and had not opened it since 2am.
Upon arriving I went directly to this empty bedroom and found the bat hanging on the curtain (its not always this easy). I removed the bat from the room and arranged for it to be tested for rabies at the state rabies lab in Jamaica Plain.
With the bat out of the way it was time to begin the detective work and figure out where this bat came from. The homeowner then told me that she noticed some droppings in her attic about a month ago and called a local Pest Control company to come out to take care of the problem. They assured her that the problem was mice and set her up on a quarterly mice-baiting (poison) program.
Once inside her attic the first thing I noticed was a small pile of bat droppings that was surrounded by mouse baits and glue-boards for mice 
. The Pest Control technician has misdiagnosed the problem. This is something that we see all the time in the field. Technicians do not know how to tell the difference between mice droppings and bat droppings. A further inspection of the attic turned up a moderate amount of bat droppings under the insulation in the attic.
Once I was finished I inspected the roof and roofline of the house and found 2 different areas that the bats were using to gain access. The chimney of the house was not capped and also needed to be secured to prevent bats from falling into the flues.
I informed the customer that there was a small colony of bats residing in her attic. I told her that I knew exactly how they were gaining access through the roof. I then provided her with a proposal to rid the house of bats and to bat-proof the house to prevent them from returning in the future. She accepted the proposal and we scheduled the project.
We returned two days after the initial visit to perform the Bat removal and exclusion service. When the work was done her house was 100% bat-free and also bat-proof.
We also installed a custom stainless-steel chimney cap to prevent bats from entering.
This particular case was a good example of a typical bat problem for this area.. A small colony of bats in a large, old house in the Metro-Boston area. Very rarely do we find large colonies of bats inside of route 128. It has always been my theory that in areas with thousands of large, old homes the bats have so many options available to them that they spread out more than they do in rural areas. In the Newton area we see small groups of bats in many houses where in more rural areas (such as Sudbury or Concord) we find large colonies of bats.
Visit our bat removal for more information on these services.
Matthew Grady
President
BatGuys Wildlife Service
