Bat Removal & Exclusion in Cortland, NY

Bats in your Cortland home

On a summer evening the West Branch of the Tioughnioga runs an insect hatch that feeds half the valley, and Cortland's bats commute from the older attics to meet it. The colonies in those attics are usually big brown bats, with little brown bats in the mix — mouse-sized hunters that slip through gaps a pencil would stop in, behind chimney flashing, under ridge caps, and through the tired screens of gable vents on the hill streets.

Bat work here is identification first and exclusion only: no poisons, no exterminating, ever. Three other New York bats shape how carefully that identification is done — the Indiana bat and northern long-eared bat are endangered, and the tri-colored bat is proposed for listing — so a roost is identified before anything is fitted, timed, or sealed, and timing follows the colony's own year rather than any fixed calendar.

Identify first: the listed bats change everything

House colonies in Cortland are big browns until the evidence says otherwise — but evidence is the point. Indiana bats and northern long-eared bats are protected as endangered under state and federal law, and the tri-colored bat is proposed for the same protection. If a roost ever pointed toward a listed species, the valves would stay in the truck, the attic would be left undisturbed, and the matter would go to the DEC for direction. That is why bat calls start with droppings, exit watches and a careful look, not with equipment.

Fall is the working window, and the bats explain why

Through summer, a maternity colony is raising pups that cannot fly; sealing exits then would strand them inside while their mothers batter the siding trying to return. Through the deep Greek Peak winter, bats hibernate, and a resting bat should not be disturbed — arousal burns the fat reserves that carry it to spring. Autumn threads between those two facts: every youngster of the year is on the wing, the colony still travels nightly to feed, and a one-way device can empty an attic while the bats simply relocate to the valley's hollow trees.

Hibernating bats are left asleep, full stop

Some big browns spend the winter in the same buildings they summer in, tucked into wall voids and quiet attic corners. A January discovery is therefore not an emergency to solve but a colony to leave alone until the season turns. If a single bat blunders into living space in midwinter, that individual is handled on its own — the room closed, the bat untouched, our crew called — without disturbing whatever is sleeping behind the walls. Restraint in winter is not delay; it is the substance of doing this work lawfully and humanely.

Old downtown stock: a hundred pencil-width doors

The tall houses off Main Street and up the hill streets were built across a century of additions, and every junction is a bat-sized negotiation: dormer cheeks, porch-roof flashings, chimney shoulders, separated ridge caps, shutter backs. Sealing only the obvious exit teaches the colony to use the second door, then the third, sometimes into a wall void where the problem gets worse and smellier. A proper Cortland bat job is mostly a sealing job — a full circuit of the building in durable material, with the one proven exit left open for the device.

Guano: read it, respect it, remove it carefully

Droppings under a roost tell the colony's size and tenure, and they accumulate season after season in the same drifts. Guano is handled with protection and never dry-swept into a house's air; saturated insulation around a long-used roost comes out rather than being perfumed over. Tell us where you have seen droppings — below an eave, on a porch, in an attic corner — because that geography is often the fastest route to the entry the colony is actually using each night.

Valve nights: how the colony moves out

With identification settled, the season right, and every side gap sealed, our crew fits a one-way device at the exit the dusk watch confirmed. The bats leave to hunt the river as usual; the device declines to readmit them, and over several nights the colony resettles in natural roosts. Exit watches verify the attic has emptied before the device comes down and the last gap is sealed in lasting material. The colony loses one attic in a valley full of trees — and keeps its role in eating the West Branch hatch.