OMG! I had a close encounter last night!

[Yeoman Randi]

So, last night the husband is out, the daughter is waiting to get picked up by a friend and I'm on the computer (what a surprise!). Anyway, the daughter starts SCREAMING, "OMG there's a bat in the house!" and i'm like, "yeah, right." You have to understand, the daughter is 16-1/2, a drama queen and more than a little bit prone to high drama.

So, i get my lazy ass off this chair and i go into the kitchen expecting to see a big moth or at the most, a bird trapped in my house.

WRONG. There was a BAT in my house! A BAT! He was SO FREAKING CUTE!!!!!! He was probably just a little bit bigger than my outstretched hand, and he was flying around desperately trying to find a way out.

Stupid me, i'm putting my hand up with my finger pointing thinking he'll land on my hand. Ok, so clearly that doesn't work, so i start thinking i'll open the doors and let him figure his way out. He's flying from room to room, i'm sort of chasing him and my daughter is screaming like her head is on fire.

I open the front door and get get in front of the bat, trying to veer him into the living room and out the front door. Well, it worked and it didn't take a lot of trying either. He was a very smart bat!

Aside from the poor thing being scared out of his mind, this was like the coolest thing to happen in a long time (yeah, my life is rather dull). I live on LI, in a real 'burb that has pushed all nature other than suicidal squirrels and crazy cat lady cats out. This was awesome!

So, question, have you had any close encounters with wild creatures in YOUR home? What did you have and what did you do?

 

[Jetfire]

We had a bat inside the grocery store I worked at...he was huddled up near a light over the meat department...he was caught and released...at home...we had raccoons try and get on our screened porch...one actually made it through but I scared him off.

 

[AstroSmurf]

I came home one afternoon to a possum in the living room. My roommate had accidently left the door going out onto the back deck open and someone was helping themselves to the cat's food. There was no running and screaming, from me or the possum. I just pointed at the door, told him to get out and he did.


But I do have another story but it doesn't involve me. My mother lives in a nice housing development in a very rural area of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. Other than herself and one other family, most of the folks who built there are retired and came from cities in Florida. The transplants are NOT used to worrying about wildlife. This older couple that built up the street from mom kept leaving their garage door open at night. My parents, a couple of the neighbors and the local sheriff kept telling them they needed to keep the garage closed but they refused to listen. In fact, they told the neighbor next door to "mind her own damn business" when she reminded them about it. Well they quickly found out why one morning about a month later. The woman was leaving to go on one of her "spa trips" and found a huge black bear sitting on the hood of her Volvo and going through her trash. She screamed, threw her purse at it, ran back into the house and locked the door. It then proceeded to eat her purse and then tried to get into the house. These people were terrified! But to make a long story short: They had to have the hood and one of the front quarter panels replaced on the car because the bear had crushed them in. They had to have the house door repaired and painted. The woman refused to leave the house for three weeks. About six weeks later, they also put the house on the market and moved back to Florida. And now my mother has an awesome story about some stupid/rude people to tell at parties.

 

[Yeoman Randi]

LOL "there was no running and screaming, from me or the possum"!!!!!!!!!!! LOLOL!!!!!!!

OMG on the bear story!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT BATMAN!!!!!

Jetfire, your racoon story reminded me of the time we had a racoon try to get into our house. We have skylights in the kitchen and a vaulted ceiling with beams running across the width of the kitchen. Well, we left the skylights open one night and when we woke up in the morning the screen on one of them was pried open and there on the beam over our heads were little raccoon footprints! He must have come in, walked along the beam and realized it was a looong way down to the ground, so he backed out and left! Could you imagine if he made his way down and into my house while we were sleeping?????????

 

[iguana_tonante]

I'm the only wild thing in my house. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

 

[MetalPants]

One time at the store I work at we had a hawk enter the building. Took a few days to get it out to. Looked pretty cool as it would soar through the building.

 

[JohnChod]

We had a bat in our house one night.

As city dwellers, our exposure to the great outdoors was going camping several times per summer. I think we actually brought the little bugger home with us. We had a few bags that we were packing up in the evening that were sitting unzipped in our car. When we got everything together and were ready to leave, we zipped up all the bags and apparently trapped the critter by doing so.

We threw our bags in the house and started unzipping and unpacking and it would seem that the flying rodent crawled out and decided to fly around our second floor and check things out.

Our cat and dog were going nuts trying to jump up and grab it. The kids were running around and screaming.

As I stood on the stairs keeping an eye on our visitor, I told my wife to get me something from the garage to whack it with. She came back with......wait for it.....a butterfly net!

Not good enough, I told her. I told her to bring my tennis racket. She did.

I faulted on my first attempt but aced it on the second. I was hoping to merely incapacitate, but it was deader than a doornail.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

So, question, have you had any close encounters with wild creatures in YOUR home?

I don't watch wrestling, so no.

What did you have and what did you do?

Did find a few snakes on occasion. Used rat traps to catch them. Had foundations in my house repaired so the snakes can't get in anymore.

 

[greenguy]

One time I woke up and found a dead frog in my toilet, which is on the second floor. The cats had been asleep and inside my brother's room all night. It was really weird, so I just flushed it and went about my business. I love bats, though, Randi, glad you could see one.

 

[judge alba]

where my gran lived a few years ago she was out in the country, me my partner and my nan were in the living room when we heard scratching from the loft thinking it was rats I sent my partner up there. there was dead silence for a few minutes then she said
"aww are you a cutie"
turned out there was a barn owl nest in the loft they got in thruogh a hole in the wall. we waited until the chicks left the nest then boarded the hole up and put a owl nest box up on the wall

 

[Canadave]

I had a bat in my apartment about a month ago, which I was able to successfully chase out. Was kind of cool, in retrospect, and I'm betting it lives in the old church next door to my building.

 

[Mary Ann]

We recently had a mouse in the house. My daughter has pet rats and we could hear the mouse scurrying between the ground floor ceiling and first floor wooden floors to get to my daughter's room to eat out of the bag of rat food. It wasn't stupid enough to try to get into the the cage with two large male rats, though.

My parents used to have a cottage in Quebec ski country, and there were always little rodents in the house. A mouse got into the toaster and died there, so the next time my mother used the toaster a horrendous smell developed as the little corpse was toasted. Apparently it took all day to clear the air in the house.

 

[GMac]

A few years back we had a grey squirrel try to get in through my Gran's bedroom window - fortunately I was upstairs on the computer at the time, heard it and chased it off the toplight window before it could break in. Those things can fall a fair way without injury, as it jumped straight off the window ledge and fell all the way to the ground before making its escape....

GM

 

[Mark de Vries]

I never had anything more spectacular than mice in the house, but these were mice who'd roam the living room while we were watching tv. In the same living room. Very brave rodents.

 

[captcalhoun]

i have a pet cat who likes to go hunting. so far we've been delivered frogs, voles, field mice, a couple of small birds, slow worms and a couple of lizardy things and one time she turned up with a goldfish.

we also had a bird of prey show up in our back garden once. dunno what it was, but i went into the neighbour's back garden and got with 3' of it before it flew away.

had foxes wander through the garden as well.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Let's see. When I was a kid and my room was up in the attic of my parents' house, I had a bat living between the inner and outer windows. My Mother freaked out. The last week my parents' lived in that house, a bat got in one night. They called a 24-hour bat guy to get rid of it.

Also when I was a kid, I was going out the back door one day and there was a raccoon in the window of the storm door, which we kept tied back, staring at me. That was freaky. Raccoons have no fear of people.

In my apartment, I have had a bird get in once; also had a bird get into the downstairs office once. I was able to guide both out the front door successfully. I've also had a few mice. Once, when my bathroom was being done over, a mouse came through the wall into the tub and couldn't get back out. I fed him some water and cheese, captured him and put him outside. He knew a good deal, though, and was back in the tub in about five minutes. This happened about three or four times, and he kept coming back. The last time, I took him about a half mile and let him go in the grass by the railroad tracks. He didn't find his way back that time.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Have you ever seen that scene from the Galactica series finale that had Lee Adama chasing a bird around in his apartment with a broom? That happened to a me and my roommates. A bird got in our house and we had to chase it with a broom for about 20 minutes before we got the dang thing outside.

 

[Mark de Vries]

We once had a tit* (snigger) fly into the house when no one else was home (a small window was open). By the time we found the tit (snigger) our cat had already taken care of it. The wall was decorated with a lovely bloodstain... I'm talking about this kind of tit, dirty-minded people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tit

 

[scotpens]

Never had a wild creature get into the house, although one time I heard the neighbor's dog barking hysterically and went outside to see what the commotion was. I found an opossum skittering back and forth along the top of the property fence. The poor critter was probably just scared and confused. Eventually it made its way to the back alley and disappeared.

And every spring in the building where I work, birds take up residence and build their nests in the space above the drop ceiling. You can hear them twittering during the day. We've tried plugging or screening every possible entryway, but they still manage to get in. I figure if we can't evict them, at least we should start charging them rent.

 

[RandyS]

My brother used to live with me, that's about it.