"There's Something on My Curtain": Twelve Months on the Cleveland Bat Helpline

The phone rings at 9.40 on a Tuesday evening in July. The caller is breathless. There's a bat on her living room curtain, her children are 'freaked out', and she's already opened three windows and waved a tea towel around. She's convinced the thing will fly into someone's hair.

Ten minutes later she's laughing, the windows are shut, the tea towel is retired, and a soprano pipistrelle is resting calmly in a cardboard box until dusk. That call, like roughly 180 others, went into our helpline logbook. We've just read back twelve months of them, and the patterns are revealing.

What the Logbook Actually Says

The year breaks down neatly into seasons. July and August are our busiest months by far — not because bats are more numerous, but because that's when fledgling bats, called pups, take their first flights and occasionally end up grounded on patios and driveways. September brings a second mini-spike as young bats disperse and sometimes pop up in unusual corners of houses.

Then winter goes quiet — mostly. Every year we get a handful of what we call 'living room emergencies' in December and January. A bat that's been hibernating in a cavity wall or loft space wakes on a mild spell, wanders indoors, and finds itself hanging from a curtain in a centrally heated lounge in Marton or Guisborough. It's disorienting for the bat and alarming for the householder, but it's rarely a crisis.

The Fears That Don't Hold Up

Reading through the logs, three worries come up again and again — and all three are misplaced.

"It'll fly into my hair." It won't. Bats echolocate with extraordinary precision and actively avoid humans. The hair myth refuses to die, and we spend more phone time debunking it than any other single issue.

"It must be rabid if it's on the ground." A grounded bat in summer is almost always a young pup that hasn't quite mastered flight, or an exhausted adult. Grounded bats do need help — but they need a wildlife-savvy volunteer with gloves and a box, not panic.

"If there's one, there's a colony in my loft and I need it gone." Usually not. A single wandering bat in the living space is exactly that — a wanderer. Roosts in roof spaces tend to go entirely unnoticed, and here's the thing: they're protected, they're seasonal, and they rarely cause any real damage. Several callers who started the conversation wanting an eviction ended it asking how they could put up a bat box instead.

When a Phone Call Saves a Roost

Not every call is about a bat in the house. Twice this year, the helpline has intercepted planning concerns before it was too late — once from a Saltburn resident worried about roof works next door, once from a builder in Stockton who'd spotted droppings and had the good sense to stop and ring.

Those calls matter more than any rescue. A single phone conversation can pause a job, get a proper survey arranged, and keep a maternity roost intact for another generation. One of this year's callers has since joined us on the summer dusk walks.

What to Do If You Ring Us

The advice is always the same, and it's simple. Contain the bat if it's safe to do so — a shoebox with air holes and a scrunched cloth to cling to. Never handle a bat with bare hands. Don't put it outside in daylight or in freezing weather. And ring us, or the national Bat Helpline, before doing anything else.

Then there's the question we love most, usually asked sheepishly at the end of the call: "Can I... keep watching it?"

Yes. Absolutely yes. Half the naturalists we know started exactly there — a cardboard box on the kitchen table, and a small brown face peering back.