Bats Fly Into New Upscale Lakeside Home

This custom cabin in the woods comes with a designer weather vane and a grand view of West Medical Lake.

A perfect summer getaway, were it only a little larger and you didn’t have to share it with 10,000 bats.

The 13-by-9 foot metal chalet is Washington’s biggest bat house.

“We’re gonna give ‘em a deck and maybe a little boat slip,” jokes Donna Hensley, an Eastern Washington University recruiter.

A nationally regarded bat expert, Hensley convinced Eastern State Hospital officials to use science and not poisons to evict the horde of pesky critters making a home in the roof of the hospital’s geriatric wing.

Using the term “batty” is generally considered bad form when talking about an institution for the mentally ill.

This time it’s entirely accurate.

The guano hit the fan last month when a number of bats squeezed through the ceiling and into the patient wards. No fangs entered any flesh, but two nurses and two patients took rabies shots after getting up close and personal with the critters.

One of the nurses is so distraught after her bat encounter that she hasn’t returned to work.

The bats, however, are adjusting just fine.

Workers who built the bat house nicknamed their creation The Bats Motel a la the Bates Motel of “Psycho” movie fame. One welder named Shorty designed a bat emblem and planted it at the roof’s peak like a fancy hood ornament.

Furry guests already are checking into their bat manor, which is set high off the ground about 100 yards from the hospital. Hensley took photographs of brown bats hanging from vertical baffles set inside.

A bat house sounds like a taxpayer rip-off, but it’s not. Craig Hinnenkamp, the hospital’s risk manager, says pest control companies wanted up to $30,000 to gas the intruders.

Total cost of labor and materials for peacefully evicting the bats and building the house: $6,800.

Muckymucks in the governor’s office, Hinnenkamp says, are keeping watchful eyes on the bat house’s effectiveness.

With good reason. Gov. Gary Locke and his family had the bejeebers scared out of them after a bat ran them out of the governor’s mansion. They also took rabies shots.

State workers thought they had things licked until last May, when 11 bats were spotted fluttering around the mansion.

Getting the bats used to a new location is the only way to solve a bat problem, Hensley adds.

She graciously donated her time and expertise to Eastern State after reading about the hospital’s problem in a July 16 story that appeared in The Spokesman-Review.

Hensley wants people to know bats are not bloodsucking vampires of Dracula lore. They are timid creatures that rarely have rabies and do a lot of good for the environment by gobbling tons of insects.

Eastern State Hospital nurses, who are involved in a labor dispute with management, filed a grievance over the bats. They are tickled that the animals have received such prompt and loving attention.

Nurses say they want to be treated likewise.

Morale is at an all-time low, says Frank Coyle, a supervising nurse who has worked at Eastern State since 1985.

Nurses, he says, are angry about a management plan to force them to work weekends eight months out of the year. The current contract guarantees nurses at least one weekend day off.

Such a scheduling change would interfere with family life and dramatically increase the nurses’ stress level, which is already high from dealing daily with out-of-control people.

Next week, the matter goes before an arbitrator. If nothing is solved, the nurses could eventually head outside carrying picket signs.

If it rains they can always stand under the new bat house.