Whidbey couple thought they found their dream home — then came the bats

By Leila Barghouty / The Washington Post

WHIDBEY ISLAND — The first time Tom Riecken caught a big brown bat, there was screaming.

Riecken and his wife, Mackenzie Powell, were pulling down walls in the attic of their new house after discovering it was home to thousands of local bats. There was dust in the air — a mixture of decimated drywall and years of decaying bat skeletons and guano. There were smells.

They had prepared themselves for a dirty renovation job — they couldn’t afford to hire professionals. It was December, and they thought their nocturnal roommates were gone for the winter. They didn’t expect to come face to face with one.

They named him Edward.

The family was well aware of its bat problem even before capturing Edward, but that wasn’t the case when they bought the house. The bats had been occupying the attic of the home on Whidbey Island for what Riecken now estimates to be decades, based on months of cleaning up layers of compacted bat skeletons and waste from the walls. The bats, like the humans, needed a place to live as their surrounding environment became less habitable.

After the state’s deadliest heat wave and two consecutive years of triple-digit summer heat advisories in the Seattle area, Riecken and Powell were eager to raise their 5-month-old son, Robby, somewhere cooler, surrounded by nature. That made the 3,800-square-foot home a deceptively attractive option for a human family — and also for countless bat families.

The trailer they had been living in was so small that Powell’s elbows grazed the walls when she carried their newborn down the hallway. When they toured the multistory 1980s Victorian-style home in 2023, they thought they had hit the first-time home buyers’ jackpot: not exactly turnkey, but priced near the local average and aching for some DIY projects.

“A little sweat equity didn’t bother us.” Riecken said. “We’ve rolled up our sleeves before.”

But the house needed more than sweat equity. Authorities would eventually deem it unfit for human occupancy. The family would cash out their retirement accounts and lean on the goodwill of bat conservationists to save their home.

It wasn’t love at first sight, but the home checked most of the young family’s boxes. With four finished stories and four bedrooms, it was spacious enough for their future. The white-shingled house was picturesque, albeit dated. It sat on the top of a hill surrounded by pine trees and Spanish moss. Almost every window had a view of either old-growth forest or Puget Sound.

“We’d saved up for years living in that trailer,” Powell said. “We just saved and saved.”

Since 2019, home prices in the United States have risen 54%. In King County, where Riecken, 37, and Powell, 35, were living, the median home price was $885,000, according to the Washington Center for Real Estate Research. Median sale prices had flirted with the million-dollar mark for years, and interest rates were climbing. When they got the spacious Whidbey house from the former owner’s estate for close to $850,000, they thought they had found a great deal. The inspection noted evidence of “rodents,” but Powell thought, “Who can’t deal with a couple rats?”

But the couple would quickly learn that getting rid of bats is complicated. In Washington, all species of bats are protected, which means they can’t be hunted or killed. They need to be “excluded” — a process of humanely getting them out of the building and patching up any entry points to keep them out. But exclusion can’t be done during the summer months when bat pups don’t yet know how to fly.

No one is exactly sure when the bats moved into the home, but Kurt Licence, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said they were probably drawn to its peak location on a hill. Since bats can’t fly without jumping off a high point, the home’s perch was a draw. It overlooked the water, so there would be lots of insects for them to eat most of the year. It was full of cozy nooks and crannies. The multi-peaked roof was built with something called skip sheathing: staggered wood joists that allowed for easy movement and ventilation.

Bats want their home “to be safe,” Licence said. “They want it to be free from predators, or at least have a good viewshed where they can detect and avoid predators easily. So really, the exact same things that we look for in a place to live.”

Little brown bats spend their summers in the area, but they fly south once the temperatures begin to drop. The bats Riecken and Powell started to find in August when they thought all of them had left for the season were nonmigratory big brown bats. Local conservationists and county experts identified the couple’s winged housemates by examining the specimens they caught and analyzing acoustic data gathered on the property. The family would learn at least four species of bat had probably called the place home at some point.

Big brown bats are among many bat species that raise their young in “maternity roosts,” communities of females that live together in groups of a dozen to several hundred. They often choose buildings because they can house roosts large enough to create warm microclimates for the juvenile bats to thrive in. Female bats will often return to these roosts year after year, Licence said.

Little brown bats used to be one of the most abundant bat species in the United States but now are one of 12 species facing serious population decline due to the deadly white-nose syndrome. It’s one of many recent spikes in wildlife disease contributing to a global extinction crisis largely fueled by human activity and climate change. Since bats tend to live in large colonies, they are susceptible to fast-spreading diseases like white-nose syndrome.

The bats living at the Whidbey house had found safety — until Riecken and Powell started tearing down walls.

It was the middle of the night during an unusually warm May of 2023 when the family’s cat, Teddy, woke everyone up with erratic jumps.

“I look up and I see this bat,” Powell remembered. She tumbled out of bed with Robby wrapped in blankets, and in a panic, shut Riecken in the bedroom to deal with the bat. He grabbed a bucket and coaxed the bat out the window.

“At that point, we should have called the Department of Health and got our rabies shots right then,” Riecken said. “But we didn’t know to do that.”

A few weeks later, Powell’s mom was visiting and spotted through a bathroom window an overwhelming number of what she believed to be bats nosediving around the house.

The next day, when it was light enough outside to take a closer look, they realized the true extent of the problem.

“My sister, my mom and I stand out at the front door at dusk, and I just see the bats pouring out of the house,” Powell said. “I’m just aghast.” By July 2023, they would realize the scale of the bat population in their home was larger than they could have imagined.

Pest control experts told Riecken there were probably thousands of bats living in the walls in 2022 and 2023, when the family discovered them. It was home to at least four species, both migratory and hibernating, according to Licence. Most of the residents were little brown bats.

Powell and Riecken paid for what they thought was a thorough inspection before they purchased the house. But since most of the bats were migratory, they hadn’t yet returned during the February 2023 inspection. Given that generations of bat guano and skeletons packed the walls, Riecken and Powell couldn’t fathom the previous owners were unaware. They’d later find out the bat problem popped up in a May 2022 inspection for a failed sale, and even earlier in 2018 before the previous owners died. A pest control expert even inspected the building and made recommendations. Riecken said that inspector, whom he later met when looking for a company to get rid of the bats, said the owners never called her back.

All large purchases come with some level of risk, said Mark Gergen, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. That’s why the home-selling process usually includes disclosures of certain conditions the house may have.

Gergen said home purchase agreements are often subject to conditions, like an engineering report or a termite inspection. In Washington, while sellers do have a duty to disclose certain defects, property transfers by an estate do not. Riecken and Powell didn’t know that when they bought their house.

“We made a dumb mistake of not knowing that,” Powell said, “but at the same time, we were still caught in a game where they were hiding it from us on purpose.”

When it came time to remove the bats, Powell and Riecken called in as many experts as they could find. One company said it was the worst residential infestation it had ever seen. They were quoted $36,000 for removal. Another found over a dozen suspected bat entrances. Their insurance company denied their claims because the bats were a preexisting issue.

Riecken did what millennials often do when faced with an insurmountable problem: He turned to Reddit. He sought advice in several forums: one for legal advice, one for DIYers, one for the local town. No one had seen anything like it.

Frustrated with the lack of protections, Powell contacted a state senator and other lawmakers about what the couple said was a predatory market that allowed them to spend their life savings on an unlivable home. A legislative assistant sent back a tepid response, saying he’d look into it.

The biggest blow for the couple, though, wasn’t the price tag or the scope of the infestation. Experts had told the family that they made one key mistake when they saw that first bat in their bedroom: They set him free. So the family had no way of figuring out whether they had been exposed to rabies. The expert recommended they call the state Department of Health and get a full series of rabies shots — a grueling sequence of five injections given over two weeks — as soon as possible. Powell, a new mom, said she felt like they failed their son.

In July 2023, as the family gathered in the kitchen to strategize their next move, they spotted another little bat swooping around the high ceilings. “At that point I was like, I have to leave,” Powell said.

She frantically shoved a few containers of baby formula and clothes into a garbage bag, while Riecken chased the bat. It had perched itself among the trimmings of a black crystal chandelier in the kitchen. Riecken swears he heard it laughing at him. He caught it with a fishing net, instinctively smashed it with a shoe, and put its pancaked body on ice to send to the state for rabies testing.

Only 1% of bats carry rabies. To accurately test a specimen for rabies, fresh brain tissue is preferred. Decomposition of the brain or an incomplete sample makes testing unreliable. Once symptoms occur, rabies is virtually 100% fatal in both humans and animals.

The results of the smashed bat were inconclusive, so the state recommended the entire family get a full emergency rabies series. Each member of the family had to go to the emergency room four times to get jabbed, sometimes multiple injections per visit. Appointments can’t be made for the emergency exposure series, and only one hospital in the state had the infant formula.

“It was one of the lowest moments of my life,” Powell said, “to feel like I put my own child in danger, and then put myself in danger too, and not understood the risks at the beginning of this when I felt like I should have. But I just didn’t.” Insurance covered part of the series, but the family is still paying off over $10,000 of medical bills related to the vaccines.

Riecken spent the next week and a half poking through cracks and crawl spaces until he caught a live bat to send for testing. It came back negative.

Months later, when the family had caught Edward, Riecken got in touch with Meg Lunnum, who runs a local bat sanctuary out of two custom-built structures in her backyard licensed by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. She rescues and rehabs bats for release, mending injuries like broken wings and diseases like white-nose syndrome. Lunnum told the family Edward was actually a female bat (they renamed her Bella) and offered them some safer bat-catching tools and tips.

Riecken quickly became an expert bat-catcher. “Each bat has its own story,” he said. “There was Bella, and then there was Nadja and Laszlo, and then there was, I think, Pinky and the Brain, and then Nancy, and then there was Bruce. We named them all.”

Riecken has spent every free moment since the bats were discovered working to make his family’s home safe again, while Powell and the baby moved back into their old trailer. With a GoPro strapped to his head, he records almost everything. Riecken and Powell started social media pages to share their progress and hope to garner a following large enough to help pay some of their bills. In the process, the couple crowdsourced funds as they took on even more debt.

They make time to spend with each other and their newly found community of bat enthusiasts who work to preserve the creatures’ habitat. Before moving there, the young family didn’t know anyone nearby. Now, they bring bat-shaped cookies to events. Everyone knows the family that bought the bat house.

“We feel like we know a lot more people on Whidbey Island today than we did a year ago because of what we’ve been through,” Riecken said.

On a cold but uncharacteristically clear evening in mid-March, Riecken decided to spend the night at the Whidbey house ahead of another grueling day of guano cleanup. As he nervously watched the sky, he thought he saw a little black shadow try to swoop into one of the home’s gables. They have installed a new roof, sealed every window and replaced every bat-enticing vent. But the family wouldn’t know for sure whether their home is bat-free until the summer was over. Or until they heard something scratching at the walls.

Powell and Riecken were finally inching toward getting the home to meet the state’s code for habitability again. Then in August, more than a year after the family’s saga began, a bat carrying rabies was found on Whidbey Island. It bit one person.

This month, the couple moved back into the house, but their fears aren’t completely gone.

“As parents we will never feel like we’ve done enough,” Riecken said. “But despite the risks, we look forward to having a magical life here. That’s the whole point.” She added, “I’m excited to be back on the island, but I’m terrified of every bump in the night.”