There’s a bat in my house. What do I do?
The short answer
Do not let it out the window. Close the door to the room, keep people and pets away, and call your local health department before you do anything else. If anyone had contact with the bat — or was asleep, very young, or otherwise unable to say for certain that they did not — that bat needs to be captured and tested rather than released.
That is the whole thing, and it is the opposite of what most people's instinct tells them.
Why releasing it is the wrong move
Bats are a rabies vector species in Tennessee, along with raccoons, skunks and foxes. Bat teeth are small enough that a bite can go unnoticed, especially on a sleeping person.
Tennessee's rabies manual is direct about this. If a person has uncontrolled direct contact with a bat — meaning they cannot say with certainty there was no possible contact with the bat's mouth — the bat should be safely captured if possible and tested for rabies. The same applies when a bat is found in a room with a sleeping person or a young child and a bite cannot be ruled out.
Here is the part that matters: if the bat is gone, the decision has to be made without it. A bat that tests negative ends the conversation. A bat out the window means a doctor and the health department are working from an unknown, and post-exposure treatment becomes the cautious call.
That treatment is normally four vaccine doses over two weeks, plus a dose of rabies immune globulin at the first visit. Schedules differ if you are immunocompromised or already vaccinated — your doctor and the health department will sort that out. It works; CDC calls it nearly 100 percent effective when started promptly. But it is not nothing, and a five-minute capture can make the whole question moot.
The honest odds
Most bats in houses are not a rabies event. Tennessee's own guidance says that in most cases when a bat is seen in a house with no human contact reported, there is no need for testing or treatment. A bat that flew through an open door in the afternoon while four adults watched it from across the room is a different situation from one found circling a bedroom at 3am.
The overwhelming majority of bats are healthy, and statewide, skunks are Tennessee's most common rabies reservoir, not bats.
But here is the asymmetry that matters. Because bat bites go unnoticed, bats are still the source of roughly seven in ten human rabies deaths in the United States. Low odds, unforgiving consequences. In a CDC review of a 2021 cluster of human rabies deaths, two of the three people had encountered a bat and released it instead of capturing it.
That is the whole argument for keeping the bat.
How to contain it safely
Never bare-handed. Leather work gloves at minimum.
Wait for it to land. A bat in flight is nearly impossible to catch and you will both get hurt trying.
Put a box or a coffee can over it against the wall or floor.
Slide stiff cardboard underneath to close it off.
Tape it shut, punch small air holes, and put it somewhere cool and dark.
Wash your hands. Call your health department.
Keep it refrigerated, not frozen. Do not damage the head and do not drown it — testing needs intact brain tissue. If the bat is already dead, that is fine; keep it cool and it can still be tested.
If you are not comfortable doing this, say so when you call. Your health department or animal control can advise or send someone. A bat you did not manage to capture is far better than a bite nobody noticed.
A bat colony is a different problem
One bat is a rabies question. Twenty bats in your attic is a construction question, and the timing matters.
All sixteen of Tennessee's bat species are protected as nongame wildlife under state law, and several — the gray bat, Indiana bat and northern long-eared bat among them — are federally listed as well.
Bat exclusion is not a DIY job and not a summer job. TWRA requires an operator to get agency approval before excluding a colony, and part of that approval is reporting whether young are present. In practice that rules out most of the summer: flightless pups are in the roost through roughly mid-August, and sealing the entrances then walls them in to die inside your house. That is both cruel and a smell problem you will not forget.
Wait until late summer or early fall, and hire someone TWRA-permitted for bat work.
Why bats are worth the trouble
A little brown bat eats roughly half its body weight in insects on a summer night, and a nursing female eats more than her own weight — moths, beetles and mosquitoes.
White-nose syndrome reached Tennessee caves around 2010 and has been devastating. Northern long-eared bats are down something like 97 to 99 percent statewide, with Indiana, little brown and tricolored bats also in steep decline. The bat in your living room is more likely to be a species in trouble than a threat to you.
Contain it, get the rabies question answered, and if it turns out to be a healthy bat that simply came down the chimney, it gets to go back out and keep working.
Who we are
Out of the Woods Wildlife Rescue & Rehab is a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit in Memphis, permitted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Rabies vector species carry extra permit restrictions and very few rehabbers in West Tennessee are permitted for bats — for a bat, your first call is usually your county health department, and we are glad to help you figure out the right next step. Text 901-340-6534.
Sources: Tennessee Rabies Manual, Tennessee Department of Health. CDC rabies guidance. TWRA Bats of Tennessee and Wildlife Damage Control pages. National Park Service, little brown bat.
We are wildlife rehabilitators, not lawyers or veterinarians. This is general information about what we see and what the agencies publish. TWRA and the Tennessee Department of Health are the authorities on the law, and your doctor is the authority on treatment.