By Mary Reid Barrow

The day after last week’s rainy stormy day, Dominique Denson found this little wet bat roosting in a Japanese maple in her Great Neck yard.

At first Dominique wasn’t sure what she was seeing but wondered “if it was a bat since it was hanging upside down.”

“I thought you might find this interesting,” she wrote.

A former Communications Director for LRNow, Dominque put it mildly. Interested? Excited was more like it. I got right on it!

What kind of bat? What are its habits? Where does it live?

I went right to my trusty “Guide to the Bats of Virginia” from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, now the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

Alas, to my poor eyes, the bats in the book all looked alike! I figured this little one could be an eastern red bat, mainly because the guide said the red bat is the most common tree bat in Virginia and the bat was in a tree. On the other hand, the weather had been so bad that any port in a storm might have looked good to this little one.

The guide also said the red bat has white patches on its shoulders and wrists, and I do actually see the white patch on what I think is its shoulder.

In addition, the critter is the only bat in Virginia that has a furry tail. I imagined that the back end of this little critter in the photo curved over into a furry tail. Maybe?

Since I wasn’t sure, I went on the hunt for a bat man or woman who could identify Dominique’s discovery.

Man of all things natural, and founder of the Virginia Beach Middle School Butterfly Garden, Maurice Cullen came to the rescue! He confirmed it was a red bat and even checked in out further, with a bat expert.

Red bats do love their trees. They not only roost in trees, but females also raise their babies protected by a dense cover of leaves. Red bats hibernate in winter mainly in tree cavities, the guide says. You might see a red bat flying around your streetlights dining on nocturnal insects.

I have had a bat house for several years. At first I hung it on my house over my deck where I hoped I could see brown bats come and go at night. That was a mistake.

The bats kept late hours, and the only evidence of their presence was little bits of bat guano on the deck floor in the morning!

So, I moved the box to an area of the house not over the deck. Still no bat sighting and now I can’t even tell if there’s guano blended into the ground!

I only imagine what might spend the night at my house but now my imagination has grown to include red bats roosting in my trees too!