Just did my PM barncheck, aka CookieTime.
I saw what I took for a mouse - movement on the table I mix grain on.
Nope.
Teeny mouse-sized bat - body maybe 3"? - on the table top.
It chittered at me as I got cookies from the container under the table, but was gone by the time my 3 got their allotment of 3 each.
If it was a baby, I didn’t see anyplace it might have come from.
Could it have been adult enough to fly?
Did my turning on the lights interrupt a hunt for bugs?
Whatever, it’s welcome to eat its fill 
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What, no cookie time for little bug hunting bats? How else are they going to earn gainful employment in this economy??
Congratulations on your new barn buddy. Some bats are small and some are big - very grateful you are not the type to just kill them! I know some barn people that hate seeing them close to the barn. I wonder if s/he happened to get stuck or disoriented?
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If he/she had stuck around, I might have offered a gingersnap crumb.
The only vermin unwelcome in my barn are raccoons & opossum.
Fleas/rabies from one, EPM from the other 
Knowing bats eat their weight in mosquitos, I’d hang out a Feed Here! sign 
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I love bats in theory, but have a healthy fear of rabies after hearing how people sometimes don’t even know that they’ve been bitten by them. They are so good for insect control (and cute!)… but I hate when they take up residence in our indoor.
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It may not have been a baby. Some bats are actually quite small. For example, the endangered Indiana bat (they do live outside of Indiana) are just 3-4 inches long in their body. But yeah, I’d rather they not take up residence in my barn
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I love bats, we have many in our back yard at dusk almost every night. Sometimes I will go stand very still and they will swoop down fairly close. I think I draw mosquitos and they take advantage of that. I love to hear them flutter.
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I have found two bats in water buckets in cooler weather. It was after we had a big storm with a lot of wind. I think they got knocked around by the wind and got disoriented. This was on two separate occasions. I dumped them out of the water and placed them into the sun to warm up and dry off and called the local wildlife rescue. (I didn’t touch them). Wildlife Rescue couldn’t take them because of Covid but told me what to do.
Bats can’t just take off and fly from lower areas - they have to catch a wind current to get airborne. So the rescue said to put them in a box with some cloth on the floor so they had some traction. And put the box as high up in a tree as you can. So I scooped them into a shoebox, got on a ladder and tied the box up in a cedar tree and waited. Both of them eventually climbed to the edge of the box and took off flying. It did my heart good to see them soar off into the air. I haven’t seen any grounded ones lately but at least I know what to do if I find one.
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LIttle Brown Bat is about 3 inches long ( th e body )
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We have bats in our house and in our barn. Rabies terrifies me, but I am respectful of and love the bats. The good thing is our current indoor cat might be able to catch a bat, but wouldn’t be able to dispose of it (no teeth). So, I feel pretty confident that we would know about a bat.
We do get disorientated or dehydrated bats at times, especially in high heat/drought conditions. The colony is in the attic, but the house’s basement is fundamentally a natural cave (complete with flowing water…sigh) and a walkout egress. And unlike the main part of the house, it might as well be part of the outside, complete with chipmunks stuffing my muck boots with seeds and acorns every day! So, they do end up down there at times. When I find them, I go put on a heavy, canvas jacket and welding gloves. I then collect the bat and take them out and put them in a convenient crotch of a tree. Seems to work.
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& Here I am.
In Indiana 
Your description sounds like it fits “my” bat.
He/she was coal-black, body & wings.
I shall call it Smudge
I think I might have heard chittering (in protest?) last night when I fed horses extra-late/after dark, after being out with friends.
Smudge says:
LIGHTS OUT!
ETA:
The front slider to my barn, stall doors at the back, sliders from barn to attached indoor & sliders on the other 3 sides of the indoor are all left open now & there’s been a nice breeze.
Hope that was enough to get the little thing aloft 
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And this wins for best thing on the internet today. Thank you for sharing your bat rescue story. 
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Bats are great to have in your barn. Until one gets stuck in your ponytail at 5 am. Not that I’d know anything about that…
They are not so fun when hundreds of them take up residence between the walls of your rented mobile home and it takes your landlord over a year to believe you and hire someone to rectify the situation.
My five years in Alabama were quite the adventure, needless to say! 
But I did gain quite a bit of bat knowledge in the process.
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Ugh. I have a love/hate relationship with bats. As one of those people who mosquitoes love, I welcome bats.
However, I am beyond disgusted 
with the bat $hit. How do those of you with active colonies deal with it?
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3 inches is also pretty typical for the Little Brown Bat, found across most of the US (but now being attacked by white nose syndrome)
When I was 11 we moved into a new-to-us (built c 1902) house which was originally the boarding house for the hired hands on a “gentleman farmer’s” dairy farm. The house was physically attached (with connecting doors on both floors) to the 90’ x 30’ building that was a hay loft upstairs and a milking parlour and large garage downstairs.
The hay loft had a large population of bats (probably little brown bats) with an extensive residue of bat guano (yes it stank). My parents cleaned up the piles of guano, and blocked all the holes they could find (they can squeeze through an opening 1/4 in by 1 1/2 in).
My father made a bat catcher out of a clothes hanger and a net curtain (the previous residents had net curtains on most of the windows) - It looked a bit like a butterfly net.
While bats can (with some difficulty) take off from the ground, they prefer to roost up high. They drop to achieve the necessary velocity, and then open their wings. His technique was to position the bat catcher below a roosting bat, and then tickle it, with another clothes hanger, until it dropped into the net. He would fold over the top of the net, then take it outside and release it.
He released one of them in the master bedroom, so we could see it up close. Then he caught it again and released it outside.
The bat catching was put on hold when he discovered some were nursing females, then completed later. He did not want to trap the nursing females outside while their young were still in the hayloft.
The hayloft had an overhead rail which ran the length of the ceiling, and out through the large swinging doors. It originally had a grabbing mechanism which rolled along the rail, and could be raised and lowered with a rope and pulleys - used for filling the hayloft with hay bales, or and taking them out when needed. The place where the rail went through the gap between the two doors was difficult to block.
He made something he called a “bat diode*”, which allowed the bats to get out, but not get back in. It was basically a disposable (and thus somewhat flexible) pie plate, cut to fit around the rail, which had a radial slit, and was bent in a way that allowed it to bend to let the bats out, but not bend to let them back in.
We got them all out, and they never came back into the hayloft, even after the bat diode was removed / fell off, but they still lived in the area, and we would sometimes see them at night.
- My father was a semiconductor physicist (he invented the Gunn diode), and he described a diode as “something that allows electricity to flow one way but not the other”.
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Probably not of much interest to an insectivore.
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They eat fruit, right?
Ginger = Fruit* 
Kidding!
*Okay, in reality a tuber 
Fruit bats are a different set of species from insectivore bats.
I can’t find any species of fruit bats that are common in the US. They are mostly in Asia/Pacific or Africa.
Fruit bats are usually (though not always) much larger.
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Sorry, I forgot the 
icon.
Smudge has been invisible these last 2 nights, so maybe my barn got taken off local bats’ roadmap?
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My childhood nickname was “Little Miss Literal Minded”!
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