When it comes to the removal of bats from homes, your options are actually very limited. The best idea all-around is to hire a professional or company to come and take care of the bat problem on your behalf. In doing so, you will be taking an approach that is legal, insured, guaranteed, and built on years of experience and working right alongside the animal you’re actually trying to get rid of.
A reputable humane bat removal company (and we would like to put ourselves forward for the role) will not only have the right equipment and tools to get the job done, such as exclusion devices, they’ll also have a greater understanding of how the animals work: where they sleep and eat, or how they behave in certain situations. When you know as much as a professional bat removal technician does about bats, you can predict what they’ll do next. It’s much harder to do that when you have no knowledge and no experience.
Although a bat removal job can be expensive if the problem has been left unattended for a long period of time, it is actually often the case that early professionals bat jobs are cheaper than what it would have cost for the homeowner to have ‘DIY-d’ the project. By the time various repellents and deterrents have been tried, the bats will have time to create more corrosive guano (droppings), have more babies, encourage bat predators to the property, and create more damage as they fly in, out, and around the building.
Moving aside from the cost of humane bat removal using a company, by doing the removal job yourself, you could actually be performing illegal activity. Bat removal – especially with certain species of bats – is heavily regulated across most of the USA, with a number of species classed as threatened or endangered, and many more suffering as a result of contracting white-nose syndrome. It has decimated bat populations over the last few years, so killing any more of them is going to be a bad idea. Bats eat hundreds of thousands of insects; taking out bats would mean that there are fewer predators to keep insect populations down.
Your ONLY approach to humane bat removal as a homeowner is going to be using exclusion approaches to evict them and take away all methods of re-entry. You can only do this when all young bats in a maternity roost are old enough to leave the comfort and safety of the roost. Otherwise, you’ll be locking young bats in and old bats out. The young bats will die inside without food.
