Inside a bat swarm at Presbyterian

When Nicholas Mascarenas recently walked out of his uncle’s room at Presbyterian Hospital, he thought a bird flew over his head.

“I asked a nurse traveling in the opposite direction (if) she saw the bird,” Mascarenas wrote in an email. “She made a look of disgust and said it was a bat.”

Bats have recently been seen inside Presbyterian Hospital, which is working with a vendor to remove the flying critters and prevent further entry. Mascarenas shared his recent experience in an email with the Journal.

A video obtained by the Journal shows a hospital employee using bags to try to catch bats that are flying in a swarm around a small room in the hospital. Alyssa Armijo, a hospital spokeswoman, said the video was taken last Thursday on the seventh floor of the hospital in a room that had been closed to patient care.

Hospital officials previously said there was no evidence that any patient had direct contact with a bat. The hospital has offered preventative treatment to people who may have had a possible exposure.

Hospital officials said they didn’t have additional information on Wednesday.

Mascarenas said he’s from California and wasn’t familiar with bats when he encountered one on the hospital’s fourth floor. He said he asked a nurse if they carried diseases. He was told that they carry rabies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on its website that bats are one of the most commonly reported animals to have rabies, and it recommends people maintain a safe distance from the animals.

Get Bats Out, a nationwide bat removal company with a blog, said that bats are drawn to hospitals because of the security provided by their height and because the lights attract insects, which are bats’ primary food source.

Mascarenas said that when he was at the hospital, employees were holding white sheets in the air in hopes of catching the bat as it flew down the hallway. The employees closed doors to try to corner it away from patients. Mascarenas started trying to help.

“I decided to flush it out myself,” he wrote. “I clapped my hands as I turned the corner to scare it. But when I turned the corner, I noticed it had most likely crashed into a window because it was laying on a white ledge. ...

“I returned to the staff and told them the bat would be easy to catch.”