Jim Kelley: Bat Chaser

Every year around Halloween, newspaper and TV reporters start hunting up stories about bats. These often turn out badly, since bat myths and misinformation are hardly relics of the past. But The Des Moines Register hit the bat-story jackpot with BCI member Jim Kelley: one of Iowa's first humane bat excluders.

“Man, this is a hoot, ain't it?” Kelley told the newspaper while scrambling up a ladder to rig one-way exits for bats that had moved into a Des Moines building. The Register says Kelley, 52, is the best-known bat excluder in central Iowa, the professional the police department's animal control unit turns to when calls stack up about bats moving into attics and crannies.

A housepainter by trade, Kelley says he's been excluding bats professionally since 1989. He's been a member of Bat Conservation International since 1991. “Everybody laughed at me when I started chasing bats,” he told the newspaper, but now he gets as many as 25 bat calls a day from mid-August to mid-September.

Kelley emphatically does not kill bats. In fact, he leaves them unharmed, just barred from returning to the indoor roost where they're unwelcome. “I want them out there for bug control,” he says. After all, the Register notes, a single little brown bat can eat more than 600 insects an hour.

So Kelley climbs his ladders, seals most potential bat entrances, and installs one-way screens on the ones that are left. When hungry bats go bug hunting in the evening, they'll fly out through the nets with no problems. The next morning, however, they'll find they can't navigate back inside. And those beneficial, if unwelcome, bats are safely out of the way.

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