The creature looked no bigger than a mouse, but its bite sent 87-year-old Orville Hires to the hospital for the night.
The Peotone man thought a baby bird fell from his tall white pine Saturday evening and he hoped to shield it from his miniature Schnauzer, which has a history of being too rough with fowl.
Instead, Hires wound up with his finger in the clenched jaws of a rabid bat. It was the second bat to test positive for rabies this month in Will County, prompting animal control and public health officials to issue a warning to residents.
“I thought it was a bird without feathers,” Hires said. “He bit me before I could even pick it up. I hit that thing, but he didn’t want to let go.
“It’s like when you get a sharp bite–it stings a little bit,” he said. “That thing bit hard. … Then I clubbed it, and it finally got off. And then I took a stick and batted it.”
After Hires got the bat off his finger, officials said he made a wise decision–to head straight to the hospital for rabies shots.
“I guess the scary thing to me here is a lot of people might not be aware that you can get rabies from bats,” said Dr. Lee Schild, Will County Animal Control administrator. “There is a problem out there … and it does pose a real threat.
“Finding two rabid bats over a comparatively short period of time could be indicative of a trend,” Schild said, adding that the potential for rabies transmission from wild animals to humans is especially a concern during spring and summer.
Last year, bats were the main mammal identified with rabies in the state, according to an Illinois Department of Public Health report, with 43 of 1,235 tested found to have the rabies virus. Skunks came in second with six positive cases and a cow and a fox also tested positive.
The other recent Will County case was a bat found near a barn in Frankfort Township that was confirmed rabid June 8.
Rabies attacks the central nervous system and is almost always fatal if not treated immediately, a fact not lost on Hires.
“I tried to squeeze the blood in case there was something wrong with it,” said Hires, who had been relaxing on a picnic bench in his yard before the incident. “When I saw it was a bat, I said, `Uh oh, I ain’t going to take any chances.'”
The doctors at Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee promptly poked him with six shots all over his body, Hires said. He has to go back for several series of shots in the coming weeks to stop the virus.
Animal-control workers then showed up at Hires’ door on East Wilson Street and grabbed the bat, which he had stuck alive in a glass jar. The bat was then taken to a state public health laboratory in Chicago where it was determined from the creature’s brain tissue that it had the virus.
Animal-control workers planned to canvass the area where the bat was found to determine potential risk to residents and domestic animals.
John Church, of the University of Illinois natural resource educator based in Rockford, said people should be careful of wildlife, especially bats on the ground.
“Don’t go over and pick them up,” said Church. “With any wildlife, people should really just leave them alone because lots of time nature takes cares of itself.”
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trybarczyk@tribune.com
