Summertime Infestation of Bats Creates Quite a Flap in Monrovia

MONROVIA —  There are bats in the attics. Bats swooping down at dusk. Bat excrement splattered on the pavement. Dead bats turning up in back yards.

By all accounts, it has been a fairly typical summer on Colorado Boulevard, where residents of the quiet suburban street have grown accustomed to seeing hundreds of the winged mammals take to the skies each night at sundown.

“I’m not crazy about them; I mean who likes bats?” said Vicki Enriquez, 34, a homemakerwho has lived on the block for six years. “But they serve a purpose. They’re part of the natural balance of things. . . . And they’ve probably been here longer than we have.”

This month, however, that peaceful coexistence turned ugly. A young couple, new to the area, took a considerably less-tolerant view of the critters, which congregate in the open attics of the street’s many turn-of-the-century homes and can carry rabies. The result was a neighborhood fight over just how great a threat the rodent-sized creatures pose.

“I don’t want to look like the troublemaker, but I just don’t think the neighbors are aware of how serious the situation is,” said Chuck Toogood, 31, who, along with his wife, Carol, signaled the bat alarm. “Are they waiting for someone to die? It’s a health hazard, really, as well as a public nuisance and everything else.”

City officials were inclined to agree. On July 3, they checked out the home of the Toogoods’ next-door neighbor and found more than 100 bats nesting in an attic. Code inspector Bill Skiles admonished the owner, an elderly woman who lives alone on a fixed income, and ordered her to wipe out her bats.

“I took one look and all those horror movies I’d ever seen came back in a flash,” Skiles said. “There was a real strong odor. We got down very quickly and closed that door. I saw all I wanted to see.”

In the meantime, animal control officers have picked up four other dead or dying bats that collapsed along the 400 block of East Colorado Boulevard. One of them tested positive for rabies, and a 10-year-old boy who had toyed with the animal underwent a series of emergency injections to ward off the virus.

“What if that had been our child?” asked Toogood, hoisting his 1-year-old son on his knee. “Say he picks up that bat and all of a sudden he’s dying on us. He’s just a baby. He can’t even tell us what he picked up.”

Bat experts, however, say the nocturnal creatures have been given a bad rap.

These furry members of the chiroptera family are not foes, but friends who gulp huge quantities of insects, most of which are agricultural or human pests, they explain. This is simply the peak of bat season, the time when the young stretch their wings and learn to track bugs, such as mosquitoes, with their built-in radar.

“I think a lot of the problem has to do with Halloween and all the bad hype,” said Lynn Barkley, the collections manager for the mammals section of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. “Bats are all over California and serve a very, very important purpose.”

Nor are they prolific transmitters of disease, experts say. In California, which is known to have 24 species--the second-most of any state in the country--about one of every 1,000 bats is thought to be rabid.

Every year, about 100 bats are taken to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, where officials report about 5% have the fatal virus. That is a biased sample, they caution, because for an animal to be captured and brought in for testing, there is probably something wrong with it in the first place.

“A healthy bat is not going to let anyone get near it,” said Shirley Fannin, the associate deputy director of disease control for the health department. “A bat who comes in contact with a human is more likely to be a sick bat. So, as a public health thing, we just tell people not to pick up or handle a bat that you find on the roadway or flopping around somewhere.”

That’s why Julian Avila, a 28-year-old construction worker who lives on Colorado Boulevard, says he is lucky that he spotted the bat that landed dead on his floor about a month ago.

“What happens if we didn’t see it there?” Avila said. “There are kids playing around here all the time. They could grab it and get that sickness. Can you imagine? That’s why I’m worried.”

But most others in the neighborhood think the situation has been overblown, and they wish everyone would just leave their bats alone.

“I like them around,” said Roger Arthurton, 52, a native of England who has lived on the block two years. “They make me feel right at home. I didn’t even know we had a problem.”