Caution and misconception

oah Heikoop didn’t know what bit him. The seven-year-old didn’t even know he had been bitten at all until the next morning, when his mother, Katie, was combing his hair at their Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., home, and saw two bleeding pinpricks in his scalp. It looked like a bite from a small animal. It was last winter, and the family had been coping with an infestation of large brown bats in their chimney. “We don’t dislike bats,” Katie emphasizes—Noah had even held a fundraiser to help save small brown bats—but they knew the bat colony had to go. No reputable animal control firm, though, would remove a colony in the dead of winter. She got in touch with the family’s pediatrician, who looked up bat