Over 1,000 bats were found in a tiny flat (Picture: East2west news)

Having a mouse in the house is bad enough, but one family had to contend with something far spookier.

They found their flat invaded by around 1,700 bats, who chose a high-rise building to become their love nest.

The bats wanted somewhere warm and cozy to mate in, as well as hibernate for the winter season.

They found their way onto an enclosed balcony and settled down ‘everywhere’ – including in cupboards, drawers, and sacks of vegetables last week.


Photographs show hundreds of the creatures crawling over one another, many of them young, at the tower block in Lviv, Ukraine.

Bat scientist Dr Andriy-Taras Bashta, who was called in to deal with them, said: ‘They were engaged in what the bats do at this time – mating.

The bats came in and started mating (Picture: east2west news)

They were removed by a bat specialist (Picture: east2west news)

‘It’s their mating season.’



He said: ‘The owners placed an urgent call to remove the bats.

‘We counted them as they were removed – about 1,700 animals in all.’

He posted: ‘All of them were alive. They are often together like this.

‘When I began to pick them up, they began to crawl away.

‘It was such fun.

‘About 80 per cent of them were young, judging by their teeth….’

They were in a cupboard and in drawers, in the cavity behind it on the wall, and up to 200 were in each of two sacks of vegetables which the owners had stored for winter, he said.

They were all released alive (Picture: east2west news)

‘The bats were everywhere, everywhere,’ he said. ‘I understand you cannot believe this…

‘I wish you could have seen the faces of the apartment owners when we began to carry them away.’

He was in ‘no doubt’ that this was a record for the number bats in such an invasion in Ukraine.

The tower block apartment was ‘ordinary’ but the bats saw it as an ideal place for their winter hibernation, said Dr Bashta, of the Karpaty Ecology Institute.

‘The first bats flew into this balcony about a week ago,’ he said.

‘The owners were afraid to go out to the balcony and hoped that the bats would fly away.

The block of flats where the bats were found (Picture: NTA)

‘And it turned out that the first pair attracted others.

‘Within a week they were gathering in record numbers.

‘Their screams could be heard over half the block’ – even though most bat sounds are inaudible to humans.

Dr Bashta ensured that the bats were released alive.

‘It took four hours to gather all of them and take away,’ he said.

‘It is rather mild now in Lviv, so the bats were released into the wild where they will have to search for a new place for their winter hibernation.’

He checked other balconies in the same apartment block – but all of them ‘piled into this one balcony.’

The owners have now closed the gap used by the bats to access their balcony, he said.

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