Embarrass is a small village just north of Clintonville on the Embarrass River — close enough that it gets true same-day response on both pest and wildlife calls, which is one of the few genuine advantages of a company based where it works rather than dispatched from an hour away.
Bat work here splits into two quite different jobs.
The house
Older homes and farmhouses around Embarrass give bats plenty of ways in. A bat needs roughly a finger’s width, and the recurring routes are:
- The gap where the roof meets the gable end
- Ridge and soffit junctions
- Lifted or failing flashing
- Behind fascia boards that have pulled away
- Chimney and stovepipe penetrations
- Cupped or split board siding
- The seams left by additions built on over the decades
The river corridor matters here too. Water and riparian vegetation support the insect populations bats feed on, so properties along the Embarrass sit in genuinely good bat habitat.
The barn
Barns and outbuildings are extremely common roosts around here, and the honest calculation is often different.
A colony in an open barn loft is usually a far lower-priority problem than one in the attic above your bedroom. The guano accumulation still matters. The living-space concerns largely do not, and airflow in an open loft changes the picture considerably.
A fair number of Embarrass property owners, once they understand what they are dealing with, decide to leave a barn colony alone — and where that is the sensible answer, we will say so rather than sell an exclusion nobody needs.
The timing governs everything
Wisconsin bats are protected and exclusion is timed around the maternity season. Seal a roost while flightless pups are inside and they die in the structure, which is inhumane and leaves you with odor and flies in a wall.
Source: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources bat regulations. Reviewed by Brian Zahringer, WI Commercial Applicator #103689 — August 2026.
This is why “we found bats, can you come Tuesday and seal it” is sometimes a request we have to decline and reschedule. The window matters more than the technique.
If one is in the house tonight
Contain rather than chase. Shut interior doors to confine it to one room, open an exterior door or window in that room, dim the lights, and give it the chance to leave — most do.
Do not swat at it. And if there is any possibility of direct contact with a person or pet — particularly someone asleep, or a small child — do not release it. Contain it safely and contact your health department about testing. That is the one scenario where the response genuinely changes.
Afterwards
Two things belong in the job rather than turning into a second call.
Cleanup. Guano in an enclosed attic is an air-quality issue, ruins insulation, and leaves residual scent that advertises the site to next year’s colony.
The mites. When a colony is excluded, the parasites feeding on it disperse looking for a new host and come down into living space. Biting that starts days after the bats leave is the classic pattern — see bird and rodent mites.
For the full picture see the bats profile, the Wisconsin bat exclusion law guide for how timing works, and the attic wildlife guide if you are not yet certain what is up there.