In a place with as many mosquitoes as Milwaukee, the bats who eat them are a welcome sight on a summer evening. However, seeing a bat inside your home can be alarming. Find out whether summer bat removal in Milwaukee is legal, and how to keep them out of your house for good.
Which Law Protects Bats
You may be surprised to learn that in Wisconsin it is illegal to kill bats. It is also against the law to prevent them from returning to their roosting sites during the summer. Doing so violates Wisconsin’s Endangered and Threatened Species Law, and carries a penalty of fines and potential jail time.
Here are the four threatened bat species that this law protects:
- Little brown bat
- Big brown bat
- Northern long-eared bat
- Eastern pipistrelle (tricolored bat)
The purpose of this legislation is to help bring back plummeting populations of all four species. Wisconsin once had healthy bat populations that consumed hundreds of thousands of insects each night. However, a fungus called white-nose syndrome has caused some local populations to go extinct. This disease does not affect humans but is deadly to bats.
Why You Cannot Remove Bats in Summer
It is illegal to remove bats between June 1 and August 15. The State of Wisconsin did not choose these dates arbitrarily but selected them because this is when mother bats care for their babies. If you remove adult bats from your home at this time or prevent them from returning to their roosts, mothers will not be able to nurse their babies and the babies will die.
Even if you are not a fan of bats in general, you do not want young bats to die inside your house. Bats often hide in crevices in the attic or even inside the walls where you may not be able to remove them. Once they die, the odor of decaying animals in your home can become overwhelming.
How Skedaddle Removes Bats Humanely
Skedaddle understands the reasons behind Wisconsin’s laws protecting bats. However, we also know that bats do not belong inside people’s houses, and will help you with getting rid of bats in a legal and humane way.
To begin, our technicians will thoroughly inspect your property to determine all the potential entry points for bats. Bats can squeeze into a space the size of a quarter, so it takes a trained eye to locate all the cracks and crevices they might use. We will then seal up all the entry points except the ones where they are currently coming in. This way, mother bats can still access their babies.
As soon as the breeding season is over, our technicians will install one-way doors on the remaining entrances. When the mothers and their now-grown babies leave in the evening to catch insects, they will not be able to return. After several days, we will remove the one-way doors and permanently seal the entrances.
Once all the bats are gone, we will clean up the mess they left behind. Bats don’t build nests or store food in their roosting sites, but they do use the bathroom frequently. Bat feces contain fungal spores that can cause histoplasmosis when humans breathe it. For this reason, our technicians take care to use respirators and remove the waste in a way that is harmless to your family.
Why You Should Call Skedaddle Now
Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control knows how to get rid of bats in your house without breaking any laws or harming any bats. We are so confident we can solve your wildlife problems that we offer a lifetime guarantee on all our bat removal and exclusion services. However, timing is a key factor in success with this type of wildlife. Contact us by phone for a home assessment today.
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