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!