As infestations go, sharing a building with a colony ofbats is probably slightly better than having to deal with mice, cockroaches, fleas, bedbugs or termites.
In other words, bats fall into a category like squirrels and groundhogs: they're fine so long as they make their homes in places where people don't live.
For us humans, the gold standard when it comes to sharing our homes with uninvited creatures is no infestation at all.
It stands to reason, then, that there are folks in the Aberdeen area who are upset the apartment complexes where they live are shared with bats. And it seems like the folks responsible for the apartment complexes are doing the responsible thing and dealing with the bat colonies that have encroached into human territory.
It's also worth noting, as former Aberdeen resident Dorothy Paugh pointed out in a recent letter, that bats are unlike mice, fleas and cockroaches in that they do a lot of good. Bats are also a good deal more common in these parts than many people realize.
In the summertime at night, it's not hard to find one feeding on the bugs that are attracted to street lights. In the evening, they're often mixed in with the swallows flitting about over the waters of the Susquehanna River and Flats. They can be distinguished from the birds because their flight paths tend to be more erratic, though it's a subtle distinction when swallows are the point of comparison.
Bats do, indeed, put the bite on an awful lot of mosquitoes, and deal with a lot of other bugs so we don't have to.
Still, they are wild animals and it's not appropriate to allow them to continue living in places frequented by people — though the occasional church belfry might well be an exception to the rule.
Furthermore, bats do pose a rabies risk, so there's a solid public health reason for making sure they're confined to unoccupied human made structures, caves and hollow trees.
In other words, they're a creature with which we can easily coexist most of the time, often without even knowing they're around without looking.
There's no reason to be concerned that they're around, but it's certainly appropriate to have them removed from places where people live.