Finding a baby bat in your house and other midnight terrors

My mate Dave from the pub told me the best way to handle the situation was with a pint glass and a beer mat, as if I were dealing with a slightly aggressive bluebottle in a beer garden. My mother-in-law, reached via a panicked WhatsApp voice note at 2:14 AM, suggested we immediately burn our clothes and relocate to a Travelodge because of rabies. The woman on the NHS 111 line, possessing the kind of eerie calm that only exists in emergency call centres and bomb disposal units, simply asked if the creature had been in the same room where the twins were sleeping, which instantly initiated a complete collapse of my central nervous system.

You never really think about what you’d do if a baby bat drops out of the ceiling until you're standing in your boxer shorts in the dark, clutching a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar as a makeshift weapon, while two two-year-olds snore blissfully oblivious in the next room. There I was, staring at what looked like a crumpled, leathery chicken nugget with wings, vibrating gently on the hallway rug.

The absolute horror of the invisible bite

Here's something they don't put in the cheerful wildlife books you read to your toddlers. The lovely paediatric doctor at A&E explained to me—after I’d frantically packed Milly and Tilly into the back of the Skoda at three in the morning—that bats have microscopic teeth. Literally microscopic. You wouldn't feel a baby bat biting you, and it wouldn't leave a mark, which is a frankly terrifying piece of biological engineering.

Which means there's a golden rule in the medical community: if you find a bat in a room where a child, infant, or someone incapable of communicating was sleeping, you've to assume a bite occurred. You can't just ask a two-year-old if the flying mouse bit them. My girls can barely string a sentence together about why their toast is the wrong shape, let alone provide a reliable eyewitness account of a nocturnal wildlife encounter. They're already covered in a constantly rotating gallery of inexplicable bruises and scratches because they treat walking into table corners as a competitive sport. Trying to find a microscopic puncture wound on a wriggling toddler is an exercise in utter futility.

So, you don't look for a mark. You just panic quietly, pack your bags, and prepare for a series of rabies shots, because the risk, however infinitesimally small, is easily not something you gamble with. The anxiety of knowing a tiny, silent creature could have brushed past your sleeping child while you were watching Netflix downstairs is the kind of big parental guilt that keeps you awake for weeks.

That whole urban legend about them getting deliberately tangled in your hair is absolute rubbish, by the way.

Apparently bat mothers are just like us

Once the initial sheer terror subsided and the girls were given the all-clear by the yawning medical staff, I found myself sitting in the hospital waiting room going down a massive internet rabbit hole about bat pups. It turns out, we've far more in common with these little gothic hamsters than I ever wanted to know.

For starters, the pups babble. The wildlife rescue bloke we eventually called (a man named Gary who wore cargo trousers and spoke to the bat like it was a golden retriever) told me that baby bats actually learn to communicate by doing a sort of "goo-goo ga-ga" routine in the roost. They're one of the only other mammals known to share the exact rhythms and repetition of human baby babbling. I spent the first year of my twins' lives listening to them aggressively shout nonsense syllables at the dog, and apparently, there are bat mothers hanging upside down in my attic listening to the exact same nonsense.

Speaking of bat mothers, they get a raw deal. A newborn bat pup can weigh up to 43% of the mother’s total body weight at birth. I vividly remember my wife complaining about the physical toll of carrying twins, but 43% of your body weight is absolute madness. That would be like my wife giving birth to a small sofa.

The mothers also "baby-wear." When the pups are tiny, they just cling to their mothers' chests while they fly around hunting in the dark. It made me think of the early days with the girls, strapping them to my chest in a carrier just so I could have two free hands to make a desperately needed cup of tea. Bat mothers also instinctively wrap their hairless newborns tightly in their wings to keep them warm, acting as a living, breathing swaddle.

We're massive fans of swaddling in our house, though we eventually transitioned to the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie once the girls figured out how to break out of their swaddles like tiny, milk-drunk Houdinis. I genuinely love these onesies because Milly has the kind of sensitive skin that flares up into an angry red rash if you so much as look at it wrong. The organic cotton actually lets her skin breathe. More importantly, it has those envelope-style shoulders, which means when she has a catastrophic nappy situation that breaches containment, I can pull the whole thing down over her legs rather than dragging biological warfare over her face.

If you're outfitting your own little noisy creature, you might want to browse Kianao's organic baby clothing collection to find things that actually survive a boil wash.

How to deal with a grounded wildlife situation

If you do find a baby bat in your house, don't—under any circumstances—try to be a hero and catch it with your bare hands. Rabies vector aside, they're incredibly fragile.

Rather than screaming, throwing a towel over it, and hoping for the best, you just need to safely contain it. I ended up grabbing the plastic tub that holds the twins' Gentle Baby Building Block Set. I tipped the blocks onto the sofa and used the empty container to gently trap the baby bat against the skirting board, sliding a piece of stiff cardboard underneath. The blocks themselves are okay, I suppose. They're made of soft rubber, which is brilliant because it doesn't cause a concussion when Tilly inevitably launches one at my temple during breakfast. But honestly, my two mostly just try to chew on them instead of constructing the architectural marvels the packaging seems to imply they should be building.

Once you've the bat in a ventilated tub, you just leave it in a dark, quiet room and call a local wildlife rescue. Gary the bat-whisperer was very explicit about what people usually get wrong here. Well-meaning folks often try to give the baby bat a saucer of milk. Don't do this. They have highly specific dietary needs, and giving them cow's milk or water usually causes them to choke or suffer from fatal bloating. You just leave them alone.

What genuinely happens next

Gary took our little intruder away in a padded shoebox to be assessed and eventually released. He mentioned that healthy bat pups belong high up in their roosts, clinging to the rafters, staring down at the world.

It gave me a weird flashback to when the twins were tiny infants, long before they could walk and destroy my living room. They used to lie flat on their backs under their Wooden Baby Gym, just staring up at the wooden elephant and geometric shapes dangling above them. It was one of the few things that genuinely kept them vaguely stationary and quiet for more than ten minutes. There's something deeply universal about babies—human or bat—just needing something interesting to look at while they try to figure out how their limbs work.

We survived our midnight bat encounter with nothing more than some lost sleep and a newfound respect for wildlife rehabilitators. The house is quiet again, though I still find myself looking up at the ceiling beams every time I go to the kitchen for a glass of water. If nothing else, the whole ordeal gave me a brilliant excuse to be overly tired the next day, which is really the currency of modern parenting.

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