We attended a concert at Vassar College and found this fellow flitting about an upstairs hallway in Skinner Hall. He eventually settled down atop a door frame and I took this picture from across the hall; it’s a tiny crop from a much larger image because I didn’t want to spook him.
He’s most likely a Little Brown Bat and perfectly harmless. Anybody who can eat that many insects gets a free pass from me!
He was at least as scared of us as some of the students were of him. Flying in a hallway full of running people must be bewildering…
Somebody called Campus Security and I suppose they wiped the little guy out during the second part of the concert.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
3 responses to “Little Brown Bat”
Well, I don’t know about harmless. Did you know that about 90% of cases of rabies in the US are from bat bites?
Yeah, it’s a pretty high proportion of infections… but from a small fraction of the number of bats.
So, to a very good first approximation, any randomly chosen bat will be healthy.
The fact that it was in Skinner hall is a demerit, but the place is a hulking stone structure with plenty of bat-friendly exterior features. Somebody always opens a window during the winter to compensate for vagaries of the steam heating system, and if I were a bat, I might investigate that nice warm plume of air…
Here’s more than anybody probably cares to know about bats & rabies from the CDC.
Also, further research suggests that only the Great Brown Bat, not the Little Brown Bat, tends to transmit rabies, so there’s that.