Will a bat in the attic have a nest of babies?

Problems with Bats in the Attic

Bats can cause a lot of problems when they show up in your attic. These animals can spread deadly diseases like rabies and histoplasmosis — a fungus that damages the lungs.

Bat guano is also corrosive, allowing it to do a lot of structural damage to your home. That's not even mentioning the smell and stains it leaves behind.

That's why you want to remove the bats as soon as possible, but you're worried about them having pups with them.

Bat Biology

Despite looking a lot like rats, these flying mammals have a totally different reproductive cycle. They don't breed and multiply rapidly the way rodents do. In fact, most female bats only have a single pup a year.

That's why bats put a lot of emphasis on protecting and raising their young. As failure to do so means their population will quickly plummet.

Bats only mate once a year, during the fall. Yet their incredible biology allows the female to migrate or hibernate through the winter without getting pregnant. That way, the female bat only enters their gestation period in the spring when there are more resources.

That's why bat pups often show up in April, May, or June.

Maternity Colonies

To help raise their single child, female bats decide to group up and form a colony with the aim of collectively protecting all their children. This is called a maternity roost. These bats will work together to provide their children with food, as well as to protect them from external danger.

These colonies often form in dark areas with easy access to the sky, like caves and attics. That's why most bat-infested attics have maternity colonies. Meaning they also have bat pups with them.

Removing Bat Colonies with Baby Nests

There are many ways to remove a nest of adult bats, but it's much more difficult to remove bats when children are involved.

Part of this has to do with the laws surrounding bats. These animals are great at killing insects. That's why their presence kills off many disease-carrying bugs and agricultural pests. This is why the government would like to let them continue doing their job. This is also affected by the bat's status as an endangered animal.

Removing bats while they have pups in their nest is also very inhumane. In the worst case, you'd use a lethal approach and kill all the poor animals. In the best case, the adults are excluded from your home and the children are left to starve to death.

Since there is no good way of removing bats when there are babies, your only option is to wait. Simply let the bats remain for a few weeks until the children become independent adults, then use an exclusion technique.

Better yet, you could call a professional to get their advice and have them remove the bat for you!

Preventing Bats

Since you can't remove bats from your attic when they have babies, you should try to prevent that scenario from happening in the first place. This means taking preventative measures to stop bats from entering your attic and giving birth to their young.

The best way of doing this is by inspecting your entire home and looking for holes and gaps that the bats can use. These could act as small entry points, so it's important to seal them up so bats can't physically get inside your home. These gaps often appear in your walls or in your roof.

The chimney is another vulnerability, so you should install a chimney cap if you don't have one already.