VICTORIA BAT REMOVAL

BAT REMOVAL PROCESS

Bats in Victoria

Bats are misunderstood creatures. Despite how they are often depicted in popular culture, they are not vicious or malicious. Rather, they are beneficial to humans for pest control and pollination. Nevertheless, having them in your home could be risky. They may expose you to diseases such as histoplasmosis through their droppings, and while it is rare for bats to spread rabies to humans, it is possible. Some species of bats are endangered, meaning that it is vital that bat removal in Victoria complies with applicable laws protecting them.

What We Do

Bats require special techniques of wildlife removal on Vancouver Island. Our humane method involves identifying the bats’ entry points and installing one-way doors over the openings. The bats can fly out to hunt for food, but they can’t fly back in again.

Our technicians are trained to determine the phase of the breeding cycle that a bat colony is in. This is important because mother bats cannot carry their babies with them as they fly around. Therefore, if babies are present, the exclusion cannot take place until the young bats are old enough to fly away on their own. Otherwise, they could die from being separated from their mother’s care.

Bat carcasses and droppings, also known as guano, can pose serious health risks, which is why we include cleaning and decontamination as part of our process.

Why Bats Roost in Human Homes

Most bat species feed on flying insects, which either die off or go dormant during the winter months. While some bats migrate to warmer climates during the winter, most species in British Columbia hibernate. They look for places that provide warmth and protection from predators. In the wild, caves, cliffs, and rock crevices may serve their purposes, but they may also roost in attics to spend the winter.

It is illegal to disturb bats while they are hibernating, but we can identify their entry points and install one-way doors during the winter. That way, when the bats become active again in the spring, they can fly away and won’t be able to come back in, allowing our technicians to move on to the decontamination part of the process.

If you find bats in your attic, or elsewhere in your home, it is important to call us for an assessment right away. Bats give birth in the late spring to early summer, and once the babies are born, bat removal in Victoria has to be delayed for their survival.

Why Protecting Bats Is Important

Bats are fascinating creatures with some incredible capabilities. We rely on them more than you may realize, and bats need our help to survive. Here are some things you should know about bats:

• While some species of rodents, marsupials, and lemurs have the ability to glide for short distances, bats are the only mammal capable of true, unaided flight.
• Out of 1,400 bat species in the world, only three feed on blood. These three species all live in Central or South America. There are none in Canada or the United States.
• Bats are not blind, but they do not rely on their vision to navigate or find food at night. Instead, they use echolocation. They make high-pitched noises and then listen for the sound waves to reflect off objects to tell them where they are.
• Bats are important to agriculture. They pollinate over 300 species of fruit and help keep the population of insect pests under control.
• Bats have few natural predators. The biggest threats they face come from disease, such as a fungal infection called white-nose syndrome that has decimated bat populations in North America.
• Research on bats has led to important vaccine advancements. Bats are also important to medicine by pollinating plants from which medications are derived.
• The incidence of rabies in bats has been highly overestimated due to testing only sick animals. When a more representative sample is taken, the rates of infection are very small.

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