That is not an anole on our lanai screen
 

My wife took a picture of this on our lanai screen this morning. It's the first one I have seen in The Villages.

Crazy thing is they sell bat houses for mosquito control. Well, maybe not so crazy after all. My parents had a purple Martin house for the same reason. Much less creepy though.

Looks like a Freetail I found up inside my patio umbrella.
Cute!

Ew! Ew! Ew!

You must have had the light on in the lanai which probably attracted bugs, he eats bugs.

You have an ancient mosquito vacuum! I am jealous.

70% of human rabies cases are caused by bat bites. And SARS, COVID, and Ebola all started out as bat diseases.

They're fascinating creatures but I can't imagine why someone would buy a bat house to encourage them to live in your back yard. I'd rather have the mosquitoes.

Do you have a source for this claim?

According to the CDC there were 25 cases of rabies in humans between January 2009 and December 2019. 13 of these were associated with bats and eight were associated with dogs.

More people die from mosquitoes than from bats. Plus, mosquitoes are out to get you whereas bats (which are largely nocturnal) generally are not. Bring on the bats!

Source? The CDC: CDC - Rabies in the U.S. - Rabies

"From 1960 to 2018, 127 human rabies cases were reported in the United States, with roughly a quarter resulting from dog bites received during international travel. Of the infections acquired in the United States, 70% were attributed to bat exposures."

Rabies from any source is rare. But not as rare as you might think, because its symptoms are so often misdiagnosed. There was a case a few years ago of a guy who got rabies from a donated kidney. The donor had died in a car wreck.

We had a sick racoon at our place in Texas once, wandering around between my house and the neighbor's. I called animal control. My neighbor decided to take care of it himself. He brained the poor creature with a shovel and buried him in the cornfield across the road.

A few months later my neighbor mysteriously disappeared. He was found a couple of days later, 500 miles from home, dead at the wheel of his truck, where he'd run off some little country road in the middle of the night and hit a tree. He'd told his wife he was going out to buy a boat (after they'd already gone to bed).

Are the two incidents related? Who knows. He seemed like a normal guy until he suddenly decided to drive to Dallas in the middle of the night to run into a tree. I don't think he was an organ donor, thankfully.

As far as mosquitoes go, fogging works a heck of a lot better than a bat house in your back yard. But to each their own, I guess.

Endless misinformation. It is a freetail. There are bats that do bite and feed on blood.
It is not one of them. It cannot spread covid or rabies.

That trail on the screen below the bat, it is either injured or perhaps not toilet trained.

I would just leave it alone.

Wildlife? We only see a small percentage of what is there. Black snakes, hum I had a piece of black wire get up and walk, slither, away. The orioles like camellions can change color to blend in.

And my CDC source is here. Apparently, a lot has changed between 1960 and 2009.

S/he must be related to our "umbrella bat" Henry (Henrietta?) who constantly slips inside the folds of our closed patio umbrella. He comes back quite often. He gets upset when I open the umbrella during the day and takes off bouncing off the walls of 3 houses. I can tell it's the same bat every time by his ID card. That photo is actually upside down as he's hanging onto the underside of the opened umbrella.

I have seen bats on other peoples birdcage, also in the folds of a closed umbrella

Conflicting information from the CDC? Wow! Imagine that!

we.had 3 from inside the patio umbrella

A bat doesn't have to feed on your blood to spread rabies. It merely needs to be frightened enough to bite. And you probably won't even realize you were bitten because their teeth are so small.

And here's another interesting tidbit about bats -- rabies is so common in bats that they have developed a high level of immunity, and often can live with it for a long time. People have contracted rabies from simply breathing the air in a cave containing a large colony of bats. In fact, there are many cases of people getting rabies from just handling a dead bat.

When a wild animal acts strangely -- like when a nocturnal animal wanders around in your yard in broad daylight or clings to your lanai screen during the day -- there's something wrong with it, and you should be concerned.

Look, I love wildlife, including snakes and bats. I'm just pointing out that maybe it's not a good idea to attract some species to live with you, or approach them close enough to take a detailed portrait.

Bats are wonderful pollinators and pest control.

I also found a bat up inside a rarely used outdoor umbrella.

I thought bats were nocturnal. I see them every evening flying about the trees in and near my yard. Dozens of them, but only in the dark evening. Why is this one clinging to screening in the daylight? Is it sick?

We were surprised to find one in our folded up patio umbrella. He came back for 3 days and on the fourth there were 2 in the umbrella. The first one was kind of cute but when he decided to move relatives in we decided to take the umbrella down for a while. Haven't seen him since. I'm not worried about them and there is no charge for the entertainment.:popcorn:

It’s a bat
 

It’s a bat, leave it alone, they can carry rabies, they are no harm to you unless you bother it.

I think it's adorable, wish I had one.

It's a bat! The last month seems to have been bat breeding season. I had a problem with the pups in two returns at the bottom of my gable roof. I had to hose them with water to get them out and relocate. There were probably 20 of them. They were black in color. Don't kill it! They eat insects and are harmless.

It’s Grandpa Munster!

I’ve read that the feces carries disease. Another reason not to have a bat house. You will get concentrated piles of it in your yard. Don’t mind having them around, but don’t want them living in my yard.

Does it really matter how many. My sons high school friend got a small bite from one in his bedroom. Never told anyone and by the time his parents figured it out, it was too late. He died. Stay away from them.

That’s very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Looks like a bat to me.

Nooooo.
It my ex. Total blood sucker

Where's Robin?
:popcorn:

Made in China?

If you are interested in seeing thousands of bats in the wild, they can be seen at Hopkins Prairie campground in the Ocala National Forest. This is a small, primitive style campground, you have to bring in your own potable water, and the only two restrooms are locked from July through September due to summer's heat here. So campground not really open in summer. The Florida Trail goes right through the campground and by the bat house. But it is not far from The Villages, a little over 50 miles from Lake Sumter Landing, and off Route 19 near Lake George. The bat house is at the edge of the campground and was built to hold up to 50,000 Mexican freetail (large) bats. For insect control, though there are far fewer that live in it, I think.
The way to see the bats is to take a folding chair near the bat house just before dusk. If the campground is open many others will join you. Soon they will begin dropping out of the bottom of the bat house and taking off in every direction like little fighter planes, off to seek insects. It is a continuing process that builds in numbers. I have had them brush branches right near my head. It is fascinating to watch, and there is often enough background light to film their flights.

In the spring, summer and fall back in Ohio, the bats would often come out in the early evening to feed. If one would toss a ball or other object in the air during this time, the bats would dive at it to see if it might be food. Those were the days of simple pleasures.

We have a colony of bats living in the large masonry wall that separates us from our neighbors. We live in a corner CYV. We enjoy siting in the Lanai at dusk having a glass of wine and watching them come out for the evening.

Bats are incredibly helpful in the ecosystem. They gulp down tons of mosquitos (which cause more human illness and death than any other living thing). They keep our environment balanced.