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by meg macdonald
wildbirdsjax@comcast.net
It’s October. The season for cooler temperatures and re-runs of bad horror movies: movies with bats that suck your blood or tangle in your hair or foretell of impending terrors. Bats. No self respecting haunted house or horror movie is complete without a bevy of bats.
Yet bats are as far from creepy as the cinema wants us to believe. These mammals are very beneficial to people. You should want these little voracious insect eaters sharing your property.
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World-wide there may be 1,000+ species of bats. In North America, the primary sub-species is the Microchiropterans, or microbats. The microbats are the smaller variety of bats: a bumblebee sized body and a wingspan of a few inches. Although most microbats are insect eaters, some may also consume nectar, fruit, or repiles. In addition to the pollination and seed dispersion duties, bats are actually indicators of healthy environments. The greater the population of bats, the lesser the requirement of pesticides, hence the healthy and natural ecosystem. North American insect eating bats are the major predator of night-flying insects. Nightly, these bats eat their weight in insects.
How do these bats locate their food? Are bats sighted or endowed with night vision? Although bats can see as well as humans during the day as well as at night, bats use a technique called echolocation to find food. Echolocation operates much like radar but utilizing high frequency sound waves that will hit an object then bounce back to the bat. The bats use this reference point to build a mental picture of its surroundings.
Like many of our other cavity nesters, bats will gravitate to habitats including dead and dying trees. Premium roost sites include loose, peeling bark of dead trees, hollow trees, and old woodpecker holes. Piles of logs, shrubs, or mixed woodland also make for great habitat. In highly developed urban areas, the removal of those dead trees and mixed woods dramatically impacts populations of various wildlife including bats. The inclusion of bat houses, human-made roosting space, greatly assists our colony-roosters by supplementing their diminishing natural environment. A typical bat house should offer long narrow chambers, ceilings to trap heat and ventilation slits at the bottom to vent heat, while the narrow openings deters predation.
Bat houses should be mounted on the side of a house, garage, barn, or tree and mounted at least 12-15 feet high. While in northeast Florida, the general requirements of southeasterly facing and a minimum of six hours of direct sunlight can be somewhat relaxed, a bat house should not be mounted so high as to be concealed by tree limbs.
To increase the odds and decrease the time interval, also give consideration to bat gardens. Flowers that release scent at night, such as evening primrose or soapwort will attract night-flying insects that feed on the nectar. Also, herbs such as chive, mint, marjoram, or lemon balm will also serve as insect attractants.
Install the house, plant the plants, and be very conservative in the use of pesticides, herbicides, and other toxic chemicals. If the insects consume these chemicals, so will the bats. Otherwise be patient. In Jacksonville, and in due time, the little brown bat or the Brazilian free-tailed bat may just consider your bat house to be their bat house. It could take one to two years to attract a colony to a new house.
In the meantime, enjoy the cooler temperature, laugh at the horror flicks, but hold onto a higher appreciation for those tiny flying mammals.
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