Bat captured with net in Hall of Languages
As Jon Gregalis walked into the Hall of Languages, an unlikely visitor swooped in from above: a bat.
‘I was one step in the doorway, and this thing just flew in front of my face,’ said Gregalis, a freshman public relations major who saw the bat flying around on the second-floor landing Tuesday at about 5 p.m.
Responding to a call about the bat, Syracuse University Physical Plant worker Mark Monette followed the yells of students and trapped the bat inside a foot-wide net, later releasing it into a wooded area on the other side of South Campus, said Ray Kowalski, Physical Plant’s west zone manager.
But bat sightings are not uncommon around campus. Monette receives 15 to 20 bat calls a year, Kowalski said. Using nets, plastic containers and pieces of cardboard, Physical Plant workers capture bats that have found their way onto the campus.
‘We routinely end up with bats in our buildings and also occasionally squirrels, and we capture them, and we release them,’ Kowalski said.
Physical Plant workers usually catch bats during the day when they’re not very lively, Kowalski said. If a bat makes physical contact with a human, the bat is held temporarily in a quarantine area in Booth Garage, but Kowalski said he has never heard of bites to students.
The leading cause of rabies in the United States is bats, according to the New York State Department of Health website.
Some students already saw bats this academic year. A bat flew around a class of nearly 120 students in Heroy Auditorium on Sept. 7, according to a Sept. 22 article in The Daily Orange. Even with the many historical buildings in Syracuse, bats appear in new buildings as well, Kowalski said.
Physical Plant workers capture bats perched on a wall by sticking a plastic container over the bat and slipping a piece of cardboard between the wall and container, Kowalski said. He is not sure how bats get into campus buildings, he said, but it may just be animal instinct to fly into a place where it’s warm.
‘They’re just animals,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying they’re dumb compared to us, but they have an instinct.’
Bats are more of a seasonal issue and appear mostly in the summertime, said Tim Coughlin, industrial hygiene manager at SU’s Environmental Health Office.
‘Students especially will notice bats,’ Coughlin said.
For Gregalis, the student who saw the bat fly in front of his face, the bat’s appearance was both ‘extraordinarily shocking’ and amusing at the same time, he said. He watched through a window in his classroom door as the Physical Plant worker attempted to capture the bat.
‘It took them a few times because the net would fall to the floor, and you could hear it hit the floor,’ he said.
As the bat fell into the net, Gregalis said a cheer aroused from onlookers, making for another bat caught on campus.
Published on January 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm
