Animal encounters-Bats & Binturongs

Bats.  My aunt is 83 years old, and apparently has some kind of mild dementia.  She can't be left alone for more than an hour at a time at most.  Her husband and son are dead, so my sister and I split aunt-sitting duties, staying with her and the bats that have found a way into her attic.  Most of the time the bats stay in the attic and we haven't had time to get rid of them.  Lately they've found their way downstairs all too often.

I stayed with my aunt for ten days recently.  In that time I killed five bats.  I also caught five more and let them loose outside.  I didn't intend to kill any of them.  I chased them around with a tennis racket, chosen because they can't detect  the strings with their sonar.  In some cases I was able to trap them without killing them, but they are so tiny and fragile that a lot of times they were dead as soon as they hit the tennis racket.

Bats in flight are scary.  A bat laying dead or unconscious on some piece of furniture after an encounter with a tennis racket is anything but scary, at least to me.  The bats in my aunt's house are tiny, smaller than a mouse, and mostly wings.  I wish they would just stay where they belong—outside eating insects.

Binturongs:  That sounds like a made up name, but it isn't.  You can find binturongs in most good zoos and you can find them described in most good encyclopedias.  Binturongs look like God had some spare parts and wasn't quite sure what to do with them.  They're carnivores, distantly related to a mongoose.  A binturong's face looks sort of bear-like and sort of cat-like.  Binturongs have grasping tails like a monkey.  I've actually had one of those grasping tails around my neck.  That happened at a big dog show near Chicago.  My wife is really into dog obedience and I'm not, so I was wandering around at loose ends when I ran into Samantha of Samantha's Amazing Animals.  Samantha really did have some amazing animals including the only tame, handleable full-sized opossum I've ever seen, and a Binturong.  I asked if I could pet the Binturong and when I did it promptly climbed up me and settled on my shoulders like an over-sized furry scarf.  It seemed to like my shoulders and stayed there contentedly for ten minutes as I talked to Samantha.  Finally, Samantha coaxed it back over to her.  As it went, it curled its tail around my neck to steady itself for the transition from person to person.  It didn't grasp hard, but I have to admit that having that tail around my neck made for an uncomfortable second or two.