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THEY THOUGHT THEY FOUND THEIR DREAM HOME — SO DID THOUSANDS OF BATS


FOR A MILLENNIAL COUPLE BUYING THEIR FIRST HOME, ON AN ISLAND IN THE PUGET
SOUND, THE COST OF HUMANELY RESOLVING THE BAT PROBLEM WAS MORE THAN THEY
EXPECTED.

15 min
403
(Video: Alyse Young for The Washington Post and Tom Riecken)
By Leila Barghouty
October 30, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

WHIDBEY ISLAND, WASH. — The first time Tom Riecken caught a big brown bat, there
was screaming. Riecken and his wife, Mackenzie Powell, were pulling down walls
in the attic of their new house after discovering it was home to thousands of
local bats. There was dust in the air — a mixture of decimated drywall and years
of decaying bat skeletons and guano. There were smells.



They had prepared themselves for a dirty renovation job — they couldn’t afford
to hire professionals. It was December, and they thought their nocturnal
roommates were gone for the winter. They didn’t expect to come face to face with
one.

They named him Edward.

Powell stumbles upon a bat while tearing down the drywall in the attic. (Video:
Tom Riecken)

The family was well aware of its bat problem even before capturing Edward, but
that wasn’t the case when they bought the house. The bats had been occupying the
attic of the home on Whidbey Island for what Riecken now estimates to be
decades, based on months of cleaning up layers of compacted bat skeletons and
waste from the walls. The bats, like the humans, needed a place to live as their
surrounding environment became less habitable.

After the state’s deadliest heat wave and two consecutive years of triple-digit
summer heat advisories in the Seattle area, Riecken and Powell were eager to
raise their 5-month-old son, Robby, somewhere cooler, surrounded by nature. That
made the 3,800-square-foot home a deceptively attractive option for a human
family — and also for countless bat families.

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The trailer they had been living in was so small that Powell’s elbows grazed the
walls when she carried their newborn down the hallway. When they toured the
multistory 1980s Victorian-style home in 2023, they thought they had hit the
first-time home buyers’ jackpot: not exactly turnkey, but priced near the local
average and aching for some DIY projects.

“A little sweat equity didn’t bother us.” Riecken said. “We’ve rolled up our
sleeves before.”

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But the house needed more than sweat equity. Authorities would eventually deem
it unfit for human occupancy. The family would cash out their retirement
accounts and lean on the goodwill of bat conservationists to save their home.




It wasn’t love at first sight, but the home checked most of the young family’s
boxes. With four finished stories and four bedrooms, it was spacious enough for
their future. The white-shingled house was picturesque, albeit dated. It sat on
the top of a hill surrounded by pine trees and Spanish moss. Almost every window
had a view of either the old-growth forest or Puget Sound.

“We’d saved up for years living in that trailer,” Powell said. “We just saved
and saved.”

Since 2019, home prices in the United States have risen 54 percent. In King
County, Washington, where Riecken, 37, and Powell, 35, were living, the median
home price was $885,000, according to the Washington Center for Real Estate
Research. Median sales prices had flirted with the million-dollar mark for
years, and interest rates were climbing. When they got the spacious Whidbey
house from the former owner’s estate for close to $850,000, they thought they
had found a great deal. The inspection noted there was evidence of “rodents,”
but Powell thought, “Who can’t deal with a couple rats?”

But the couple would quickly learn that getting rid of bats is complicated. In
Washington, all species of bats are protected, which means they can’t be hunted
or killed. They need to be “excluded” — a process of humanely getting them out
of the building and patching up any entry points to keep them out. But exclusion
can’t be done during the summer months when bat pups don’t yet know how to fly.

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No one is exactly sure when the bats moved into the home, but Kurt Licence, a
biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said they were
probably drawn to its peak location on a hill. Since bats can’t fly without
jumping off a high point, the home’s perch was a draw. It overlooked the water,
so there would be lots of insects for them to eat most of the year. It was full
of cozy nooks and crannies. The multi-peaked roof was built with something
called skip sheathing: staggered wood joists that allowed for easy movement and
ventilation.

Bats want their home “to be safe,” Licence said. “They want it to be free from
predators, or at least have a good viewshed where they can detect and avoid
predators easily. So really, the exact same things that we look for in a place
to live.”



Little brown bats spend their summers in the area, but they fly south once the
temperatures begin to drop. The bats that Riecken and Powell started to find in
August when they thought that all of them had left for the season were
nonmigratory big brown bats. Local conservationists and county experts
identified the couple’s winged housemates by examining the specimens they caught
and analyzing acoustic data gathered on the property. The family would learn
that at least four species of bat had probably called the place home at some
point.

Big brown bats are among many bat species that raise their young in “maternity
roosts,” communities of females that live together in groups of a dozen to
several hundred. They often choose buildings because they can house roosts large
enough to create warm microclimates for the juvenile bats to thrive in. Female
bats will often return to these roosts year after year, Licence said.

Little brown bats used to be one of the most abundant bat species in the United
States but now are one of 12 species facing serious population decline due to
the deadly white-nose syndrome. It’s one of many recent spikes in wildlife
disease contributing to a global extinction crisis largely fueled by human
activity and climate change. Since bats tend to live in large colonies, they are
susceptible to fast-spreading diseases like white-nose syndrome.

The bats living at the Whidbey house had found safety — until Riecken and Powell
started tearing down walls.

Tom Riecken cleans up what he calls “Lasagna of Death,” the layered block of
feces and skeletons left behind by generations of nesting bats. (Video: John
Farrell/The Washington Post)


It was the middle of the night during an unusually warm May of 2023 when the
family’s cat, Teddy, woke everyone up with erratic jumps.

“I look up and I see this bat,” Powell remembered. She tumbled out of bed with
Robby wrapped in blankets, and in a panic, shut Riecken in the bedroom to deal
with the bat. He grabbed a bucket and coaxed the bat out the window.

“At that point, we should have called the Department of Health and got our
rabies shots right then,” Riecken said. “But we didn’t know to do that.”

A few weeks later, Powell’s mom was visiting and spotted through a bathroom
window an overwhelming number of what she believed to be bats nosediving around
the house.

The next day, when it was light enough outside to take a closer look, they
realized the true extent of the problem.

“My sister, my mom and I stand out at the front door at dusk, and I just see the
bats pouring out of the house,” Powell said. “I’m just aghast.” By July 2023,
they would realize the scale of the bat population in their home was larger than
they could have imagined.


Video recorded at dusk shows bats pouring out of a hole in the house's roof.
(Video: Tom Riecken)

Pest control experts told Riecken there were probably thousands of bats living
in the walls in 2022 and 2023, when the family discovered them. It was home to
at least four species, both migratory and hibernating, according to Licence.
Most of the residents were little brown bats.

Powell and Riecken paid for what they thought was a thorough inspection before
they purchased the house. But since most of the bats were migratory, they hadn’t
yet returned during the February 2023 inspection. Given that generations of bat
guano and skeletons packed the walls, Riecken and Powell couldn’t fathom that
the previous owners were unaware. They’d later find out that the bat problem
popped up in a May 2022 inspection for a failed sale, and even earlier in 2018
before the previous owners died. A pest control expert even inspected the
building and made recommendations. Riecken said that inspector, whom he later
met when looking for a company to get rid of the bats, said the owners never
called her back.

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All large purchases come with some level of risk, said Mark Gergen, a law
professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. That’s why
the home-selling process usually includes disclosures of certain conditions the
house may have.

Gergen said home purchase agreements are often subject to conditions, like an
engineering report or a termite inspection. In Washington, while sellers do have
a duty to disclose certain defects, property transfers by an estate do not.
Riecken and Powell didn’t know that when they bought their house.

“We made a dumb mistake of not knowing that,” Powell said, “but at the same
time, we were still caught in a game where they were hiding it from us on
purpose.”




When it came time to remove the bats, Powell and Riecken called in as many
experts as they could find. One company said it was the worst residential
infestation it had ever seen. They were quoted $36,000 for removal. Another
found over a dozen suspected bat entrances. Their insurance company denied their
claims because the bats were a preexisting issue.

Because Washington state protects certain bat species, Riecken and Powell needed
to follow state requirements to humanely get them out of the building and patch
up any entry points to keep them out. For a hefty fee, specialty pest-control
experts could help with that process, called exclusion, but they wouldn’t do the
clean-up. The work can’t be done if the bats occupying the space have newborns
or juveniles that don’t yet know how to fly, which is often the case during the
summer months.

Riecken did what millennials often do when faced with an insurmountable problem:
He turned to Reddit. He sought advice in several forums: one for legal advice,
one for DIYers, one for the local town. No one had seen anything like it.

Frustrated with the lack of protections, Powell contacted a state senator and
other lawmakers about what the couple said was a predatory market that allowed
them to spend their life savings on an unlivable home. A legislative assistant
sent back a tepid response, saying he’d look into it.

The biggest blow for the couple, though, wasn’t the price tag or the scope of
the infestation. Experts had told the family that they made one key mistake when
they saw that first bat in their bedroom: They set him free. So the family had
no way of figuring out whether they had been exposed to rabies. The expert
recommended they call the Washington Department of Health and get a full series
of rabies shots — a grueling sequence of five injections given over two weeks —
as soon as possible. Powell, a new mom, said she felt like they failed their
son.



In July 2023, as the family gathered in the kitchen to strategize their next
move, they spotted another little bat swooping around the high ceilings. “At
that point I was like, I have to leave,” Powell said.

She frantically shoved a few containers of baby formula and clothes into a
garbage bag, while Riecken chased the bat. It had perched itself among the
trimmings of a black crystal chandelier in the kitchen. Riecken swears he heard
it laughing at him. He caught it with a fishing net, instinctively smashed it
with a shoe, and put its pancaked body on ice to send to the state for rabies
testing. It came back inconclusive.

Only 1 percent of bats carry rabies. To accurately test a specimen for rabies,
fresh brain tissue is preferred. Decomposition of the brain or an incomplete
sample makes testing unreliable. Once symptoms occur, rabies is virtually 100
percent fatal in both humans and animals.

The results of the smashed bat were inconclusive, so the state recommended that
the entire family get a full emergency rabies series. Each member of the family
had to go to the emergency room four times to get jabbed, sometimes multiple
injections per visit. Appointments can’t be made for the emergency exposure
series, and only one hospital in the state had the infant formula.

“It was one of the lowest moments of my life,” Powell said, “to feel like I put
my own child in danger, and then put myself in danger too, and not understood
the risks at the beginning of this when I felt like I should have. But I just
didn’t.” Insurance covered part of the series, but the family is still paying
off over $10,000 of medical bills related to the vaccines.

Riecken spent the next week and a half poking through cracks and crawl spaces
until he caught a live bat to send for testing. It came back negative.


A rehabilitated bat takes in its surroundings. (Video: Alyse Young)

Months later, when the family had caught Edward, Riecken got in touch with Meg
Lunnum, who runs a local bat sanctuary out of two custom-built structures in her
backyard licensed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. She rescues
and rehabs bats for release, mending injuries like broken wings and diseases
like white-nose syndrome. Lunnum told the family Edward was actually a female
bat (they renamed her Bella) and offered them some safer bat-catching tools and
tips.

Riecken quickly became an expert bat-catcher. “Each bat has its own story,” he
said. “There was Bella, and then there was Nadja and Laszlo, and then there was,
I think, Pinky and the Brain, and then Nancy, and then there was Bruce. We named
them all.”

Riecken has spent every free moment since the bats were discovered working to
make his family’s home safe again, while Powell and the baby moved back into
their old trailer. With a GoPro strapped to his head, he records almost
everything. Riecken and Powell started social media pages to share their
progress and hope to garner a following large enough to help pay some of their
bills. In the process, the couple crowdsourced funds as they took on even more
debt.

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They make time to spend with each other and their newly found community of bat
enthusiasts who work to preserve the creatures’ habitat. Before moving there,
the young family didn’t know anyone nearby. Now, they bring bat-shaped cookies
to events. Everyone knows the family that bought the bat house.

“We feel like we know a lot more people on Whidbey Island today than we did a
year ago because of what we’ve been through,” Riecken said.

On a cold but uncharacteristically clear evening in mid-March, Riecken decided
to spend the night at the Whidbey house ahead of another grueling day of guano
cleanup. As he nervously watched the sky, he thought he saw a little black
shadow try to swoop into one of the home’s gables. They have installed a new
roof, sealed every window and replaced every bat-enticing vent. But the family
wouldn’t know for sure whether their home is bat-free until the summer was over.
Or until they heard something scratching at the walls.

Powell and Riecken were finally inching toward getting the home to meet the
state’s code for habitability again. Then in August, more than a year after the
family’s saga began, a bat carrying rabies was found on Whidbey Island. It bit
one person.

This month, the couple moved back into the house, but their fears aren’t
completely gone.

“As parents we will never feel like we’ve done enough,” Riecken said. “But
despite the risks, we look forward to having a magical life here. That’s the
whole point.” She added, “I’m excited to be back on the island, but I’m
terrified of every bump in the night.”




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