Battle over bats: Lakeland trapper decries law barring relocation of colonies from city

Dustin Hooper was 12 years old when he caught his first bats.

Hooper was so excited about the capture of the winged mammals that he took one to school, displaying it to his fellow seventh-graders. A teacher, understandably alarmed, contacted the Florida Department of Health, which sent someone to claim the bats Hooper and his friends had snared.

More than four decades later, Hooper is still dealing with mammals of the order Chiroptera. As owner of All Creatures Wildlife Control, Hooper in recent weeks has been working to evict colonies of bats from two apartment complexes in Lakeland.

But state law forbids Hooper from addressing the problem as one might expect, by capturing the bats and transporting them to another location. Instead, he is limited to using techniques that prevent the bats from re-entering the buildings through their established openings after they have left.

Hooper says that is not an effective approach.

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“Well, what are they going to do?” he said. “They're going to go to the other side of the house or the neighbor's house down the street. So consequently, the bats just keep building up in population. I bet you in Lakeland alone, there's probably over a million of them. Just in Lakeland.”

Hooper declined to give the locations of the apartments, saying the owners wanted to avoid drawing attention. He said he had also been hired to exclude bats from buildings in Brandon and Altamonte Springs.

At one of the Lakeland apartment complexes, Hooper said he found at least 15 bat colonies across multiple buildings.

“I can’t believe how many active bat colonies are in this one place,” he said.

Hooper’s work ended Saturday with the beginning of the bat maternity season. It is illegal in Florida to use exclusion devices between April 15 and Aug. 15 — or to harass bats with lights, sounds or toxic substances.

Exit with no return

Hooper, 55, became a professional wildlife trapper in 2004. He said he believes he has an innate connection to animals based on his Native American ancestry, which he traces to the uncle of Pocahontas, the Powhatan princess. Hooper’s company handles calls for the control or removal of wildlife including foxes, bees, rats, raccoons, squirrels and snakes.

Florida is home to 13 endemic species of bats, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. They feed on insects, catching them on the fly during nightly hunting excursions.

Florida’s bats roost in holes in dead trees, dead palm fronds, clumps of Spanish moss and natural caves. They have also adapted to human-made structures and will take up residence in buildings, needing only a hole as small as three-quarters of an inch in diameter to enter, according to the FWC.

Some species roost individually, and those bats sometimes use garages, sheds or even the folds in patio umbrellas, the FWC says.

Because of the law against catching bats, Hooper and other trappers are only allowed to exclude bats once they have left a building. Some wildlife professionals use netting to create exclusion systems, but Hooper said he avoids that method, having learned that bats often get tangled in the nets.

Instead, he deploys cone-shaped strips of canvas, which he attaches around the exit point with screws or duct tape. The bats are able to squeeze out through the cone, but the opening is too small for them to re-enter.

Florida law requires an exclusion device to remain in place for four days, giving all the bats in a colony enough time to vacate. Hooper said that typically only takes two days. After four days, the hole can be sealed so that bats can’t use it again.

Hooper, though, said that merely excluding bats from one entry point does not necessarily solve the problem. He said bats will either find a different way back into the same structure or find another one nearby.

Bats play an important role in the ecosystem by controlling the population of mosquitoes, which can spread such diseases as West Nile virus disease and encephalitis, and also by pollinating plants and dispersing seeds. But bats also can carry rabies, as other mammals do, and their droppings can spawn histoplasmosis, a respiratory disease.

For those reasons, Hooper would like to trap the bats that roost in human structures and take them to a more natural location, such as deep in the Green Swamp, which covers northern Polk County. But that is not an option under state law.

Would bats come back?

In explaining the rule against relocating bats, the FWC says that the animals “have incredible homing capabilities and will return to the roost site after being relocated.” Moving bats to another site would also reduce their chances of survival, the agency says.

Hooper flatly dismisses those claims, which he said are speculative. He calls the state law “old, outdated and ridiculous.” Hooper said that he knows from experience that bats, if taken far enough away, will not return.

Hooper also doesn’t buy the claim that relocating bats would endanger their health.

“How in the hell do they know that?” he said of the FWC. “That is nonsense. You take 500 or 1,000 bats out of downtown Lakeland put them out in the Green Swamp, where there's an abundant supply of food — how's that going to reduce their chances of survival? It’s ridiculous. It’s just stupid.”

One strategy for deterring bats from roosting in houses and other buildings is to install dedicated bat houses — thin boxes with slots in the bottom mounted on pole.

On its website, the FWC suggests that displaced bats might move to such a box after being excluded from a structure. The bat house should be installed along the bats’ flight path and while the original roost is still active, the FWC says.

Hooper, though, is skeptical about that approach.

“You can’t coax them into a bat house,” he said. “There are too many places for them to hide.”

Hooper said he is going to use the offseason to push for a change to the state law.

“I'm going to talk to our local representatives,” he said. “I'm getting everything in a row, and I'm going to battle. I don't care if I have to stir the pot or not. They're putting people in danger at this point. Too many bats in the city.”

Hooper said the idea of allowing relocation should be popular.

“If the law was changed and we are able to capture them safely and relocate them, that's only going to benefit everybody, not just the homeowners or renters, but the trappers, too, because they're doing more work, they'll have to charge more, they're taking bats out of the city,” he said. “So everybody's going to benefit from this.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Lakeland trapper wants law changed to allow moving bats out of city