Of Bats and Batboxes

One of the eternal arguments here at the beach revolves around how many bats are co-residents in each home.  All the houses in this part of the world are made of wood and have thatch roofs.  They are quaint and gorgeous – I call mine the “The Gingerbread House” – and I love the comfy feel of being housed in natural materials, I love that it is not even because the walls have to follow the dictates of the poles and the wood.
There is one drawback, however, one blot on perfection.  These houses are perfect batboxes.  One gets used to the constant rustling and shuffling that goes on in the walls – even the trills that ring out imam like on a regularly basis, and loath as I am to admit it, one even becomes inured to the odour. Well, maybe not totally.
Afternoons are particularly difficult at this time of the year as the main focus of the sun is on the west wall, and as it heats up so does the aroma.  My first step in the Battle against The Bats was to buy an air freshener.  The nearest town is Xai Xai, and while it has grown enormously over the past five years and there is a much wider availability of products, the only air freshener I could find was a determined yellow announcing the soothing aroma of lemon.
Donna Alda, my paragon who assists this domestically impaired woman three times a week, grabbed it from me with great glee and delight and flew upstairs to place it in what she felt was the most strategic spot.  It works, but somehow the inference is that of disguising the smell of a public toilet.
Many plans and schemes have been hatched and executed to rid us of The Bats.  Come sunset we all take up vantage points to pinpoint where they are all coming from, where exactly is the  hole.  The how many comes into play here too, because if the squadron is in single digits, not worth fussing about because the staple diet of these bats is mosquitoes, and given that this is an area where malaria is pandemic this is a good thing.  What I cannot understand is how something as flimsy as a mosquito can smell quite so dreadful after passing through the digestive system of a bat. 
So we go through miles of shadecloth, we hang buckets of water under their escape hatches to drown them, we fill our walls with silicon which sometimes expands so much it makes the walls look uneasily pregnant.  My neighbour got a plan for building a batbox off the internet – his bats said “Thanks, but no thanks we are quite happy in this house!” A team of students here for a short visit created a Wimbledon massacre killing 25 of the hapless creatures with their tennis rackets.
Our resident batproofer is a cheerful chap called Arlindo. After his last sealing off of any and every apparent nook and cranny he gave us strict injunction to keep watching at sunset to see if he had missed any gaps.  Jaime and I duly took guard and for the next couple of nights there was no bat activity of note.  Feeling well pleased that we would soon be able to breathe normally again now that the bat numbers were once again manageable, I forgot about the batwatch until a bloodcurdling yell a couple of evenings later had me elevating a substantial distance from the floor.  With heart rat-a-tatooing merrily, mouth dry I ventured to the window fully expecting to find Jaime surrounded by a gang of machete wielding hooligans only to find him shaking his fist and yelling invective at the crowd of bats that had swooped out of the wall of my bedroom!
I suppose all we can say is Aluta Continua!

©Glenda Stephens, July 2012