Outta here! Experts eject bats from abandoned baseball stadium
Pipes to catch bats extend from some hideouts in the grandstand.
By Gerry May
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SHREVEPORT, Louisiana (KTBS) — More than a decade after the last baseball bats swung at Fair Grounds Field, the flying, furry kind of bats are now on their way out of the park.
A visiting team of experts from Perault Nuisance Wildlife Control in Denham Springs is in town to catch all of the bats that infest the former home of the Shreveport Captains. And they’re off to a good start.
“We got 500 right now,” says company owner David Perault, as he lifted a lid off of a rubber barrel that serves as the end of a catch system. The barrel had a swarm of the creatures huddling inside.
Perault thinks they’ve caught about half of the bats. But he’s not sure.
“We could get in a place where we catch a thousand in one night. You just don’t really know. We got cameras and we can see down in there. But we just can’t tell how many. You see a bunch of bats. But you don’t know how far it goes down,” Perault said.
His company invented a way to catch and then release the bats alive back into the wild. A series of pipes extend down from the bats’ hideouts inside the grandstand structure.
“Where the bats come in and out — they come out every night — they’ll drop down down into the system. The system comes down to our designed buckets,” Perault explained, again showing the inside of a barrel that contains a small “trampoline.”
“So they land softly,” he added.
Perault hopes to finish the roundup by the weekend. When all the bats have been caught, Perault says they’ll be set free in some woods about 25 miles away.
That’s also when demolition will begin on the stadium.
Perault and his team are also cleaning up the mess the bats have left behind.
“Over the years, there’s a lot of poop up there. You got to wear respirators, Tyvek suits. We spray it down with Clorox to kill everything in it. So it’s gonna be squeaky, smelling good up there when we get through.”
It’s all a relief for Shelton Henderson, who owns the company whose crews will be in charge of demolishing the stadium.
“I’m not a fan of bats. These are good people here,” Henderson said of Perault and his team.
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