It hasn't happened in a couple of years, but it's not that unusual around this time of year to find a bat on the underside of my front porch. I'm in a 2nd-story unit with steel & concrete stairs (fun creepy nighttime clanging noises!), but the actual porch at the top of the stairs is big planks of wood, maybe 8 inches wide and 4 inches deep--I've never measured.
I'm pretty sure we get one of the Myotis species around here, just a little thumb-sized fuzzbomb with wings. Having grown up with my eyeballs glued to books and documentaries about wildlife, I actually know how to rescue a bat, and if we get one this year I'll snag it immediately since we have sweet but heavy-footed folks in the other upstairs unit. Management is awesome--no one has yet, but if they get a call for bat removal from another tenant, instead of having the critter killed and tested for rabies, they'll call me. Typically when I do yoink a bat, I settle it in a small ventilated plastic container that has some wadded-up paper towels in it. To them, the folds of paper towel feel like being in a colony situation, which is comforting. The usual routine is after a couple of hours warming up, they start rustling about and are taken out on the balcony to get their bearings and be on their way. If they don't start rustling after several hours, I call the wildlife rehabilitator, who has always not only complimented my rescue technique but always returns my container (and my glove the year the bat climbed inside and I ditched the entire glove into the box rather than stress the poor li'l guy).
Please always be awesome to bats. We NEED our bats!
And, especially in the Midwestern states now, if you see a bat around your home, check its face as closely as you can! If it appears to have a white "frost" on its face, particularly in late fall or early winter, call your local fish & wildlife or forestry service types IMMEDIATELY. "White Nose Syndrome" is a fungal infection that is harmless to humans but fatal to bat colonies--it spreads from bat to bat like wildfire and messes up their metabolism so they don't hibernate during the winter. Instead they go out in the cold they're not built for and try to hunt bugs that aren't there any more. Many popular tourist caves on the eastern seaboard have had to be closed because of WNS, which likes to travel in dirt on people's shoes
. It's moving westward slowly but steadily, just like the frog fungus that has wiped out entire species in parts of the world, just like fire ants, Argentine yellow crazy ants, and Africanized bees are still spreading. Bats still have a chance, but since WNS isn't restricted to a few species or families of bats, they ALL need our help or we'll be up to our knees in crop-eating caterpillars and disease-carrying mosquitos!