bat houses

Improving Bat Houses in America:

Bat Houses

Nearly 40 Years of Progress and Still Learning

9/14/2020

By Merlin Tuttle

Bat houses are outstanding tools for education. When I introduced them to Americans in 1982, my primary objective was to help people overcome fear and accept bats as valuable neighbors. That goal has been vastly exceeded. Today, hundreds of thousands of American bats live in a wide variety of bat houses.

Individuals who have carefully tested local bat preferences, and adapted accordingly, are reporting close to 90 percent occupancy. Nevertheless, there is still much to be learned. And that is why we’re initiating new collaborations.

Late last month, local member, Debbie Zent, founder of Austin Batworks, reported an impressive event. Her three-chamber nursery house had been caulked, sealed, and painted inside and out, and was mounted high on a streamside ranch building—a nearly perfect combination. But to find it overflowing with occupants just days later was surprising.

This Texas Hill Country bat house became overcrowded within days by Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis).
The house was ideally located approximately 18 feet up on a building beside a permanent creek where it receives only morning to mid-day sun.

Was this extraordinary success due to house or location quality, or were these bats simply desperate?

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A School Where Bats Are Welcome

Bat Houses, Conservation

7/11/19
By Merlin Tuttle

 

Ariel Miller documenting installation of her school’s new bat houses.

Skybridge Academy is doing something new! While many school administrators might panic at the sight of a bat in the yard, Ariel Miller, founder of the school in Dripping Springs, Texas, recently invited us to install two bat houses in her schoolyard. She hopes to attract hundreds of Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) and use them as teaching aids across Skybridge’s custom-made curriculum.

 

To put it mildly, the school is innovative! The yard includes a pair of pigs, a beehive, a vegetable garden, and now deluxe housing for bats. Students choose their own subjects and learn practical skills, completely omitting standardized testing. Skybridge alumni have an outstanding track record of achievement regardless of whether they opt to pursue higher education or another career path. (more…)

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Young Conservationist Makes a Difference

Bat Houses, Conservation

Young Conservationist Makes a Difference
12/6/18

Anyll Markevich is a young man with a mission. He writes to Merlin, “I became interested in bats thanks to your book, The Secret Lives of Bats. It is one of my favorite books, and I have recommended it to more people than I can count! I have always known bats were cool, but not to the extent I discovered in your book. I want to be a wildlife biologist or ethologist when I grow up, so your book easily fascinated me.”

 

Anyll is far more than just interested. He’s also busily helping bats. He has written letters to editors in response to our Bat Flashes but wanted to do more. Using photos from our photo gallery, he designed his own bat brochures which he handed out to people at a local pedestrian mall. However, people were preoccupied with shopping and didn’t seem too interested.

 

He then emailed Merlin for advice on how to build bat houses that would best accommodate bat needs in the mountain climate of Colorado. He built nine, keeping one for himself, and sold seven to raise funds he donated to MTBC to help bats. But, being a very inventive 14-year-old, he passed his $100 gift through his father, who’s company matched his funds dollar for dollar through American Online Giving Foundation.

 

Lacking an ideal location for his bat house, he had to mount it a bit low, late in 2016. By the next summer, he found his first occupant. This year, Anyll and his mom noticed several bats flying around their yard for the first time. He checked his bat house and counted up to five. They’ve now left for winter, but he’s optimistic that he has the beginning of a colony. He’ll soon contact his customers, each of whom received instructions and one of his brochures. He’s hoping to hear of further success.

 

In his most recent communication, Anyll reported, “There is an exciting new development! Our local library (Boulder Public Library) wants me to build a four-chamber nursery bat house.” Furthermore, he got to meet professor Rick Adams, a well-known bat researcher and fellow conservationist from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Northern Colorado. Rick will be consulting on placement of Anyll’s bat house, making Anyll very proud! His next objective is to convince the librarians to permit him to provide his brochures to interested library users.

 

 

 

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Collaboration to Improve Housing for Bats

Bat Houses

9/20/18

Harrison (standing) and Christopher showing off their new BatBnB houses.

For the past 18 months Merlin has been assisting Harrison Broadhurst and Christopher Rannefors in creating a line of designer bat houses, attractive to both home owners and bats. Their curving architecture isn’t, just pleasing to the eye. At least theoretically, it may increase the area available for roosting, since most bats appear to prefer to line up with faces exposed to the outside air, not to another’s posterior, quite understandable!

The new houses are constructed of kiln-dried, sustainably sourced, three-quarter-inch western red cedar, with each piece dovetailed and caulked, thus minimizing leakage. Roosting chambers are extra tall (20-26 inches) and vented to ensure thermal gradients preferred by bats. All landing and roosting surfaces provide one-eighth-inch-deep cross cuts at half-inch intervals, ensuring maximum footholds for young bats. By avoiding plywood, the possibility of early deterioration and potential off-gassing are finally eliminated. Furthermore, treatment with Thompson’s WaterSeal Semi Transparent Stain & Sealer will additionally protect against warping.  BatBnBs come with complete instructions and are easy to mount.

We’re proud to be a part of Harrison and Chris’ efforts on behalf of bats and a safer environment. They’ve been featured in dozens of leading publications and have even appeared on several television shows. You can learn more about them and obtain your own BatBnB by visiting their online shop. By using the code MERLIN when ordering you will be given a 10% discount, and the company will donate to MTBC an additional 5% of all orders using this code. Feel free to share this discount and BatBnB’s website with friends and let us know about your progress. By purchasing a BatBnB, you can reduce the threat of harmful pesticides in your neighborhood and help MTBC educate the world about these invaluable neighbors.

 

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Monitoring Impacts of WNS

White-nose syndrome

Monitoring Impacts of White-Nose Syndrome (WNS): Decline and Stabilization in a Little Brown Bat Nursery Colony,

A Case History from New York

By Merlin D. Tuttle
9/25/16

 

A New York nursery colony of little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) offers a window of opportunity for monitoring the impact and hoped for recovery of this recently devastated species. The colony occupies seven four-chamber, nursery-style bat houses provided by Lew and Dorothy Barnes. The houses were mounted on two sides of their barn near Lake Erie in western New York in the spring of 1995. By July 16, 1997 they had attracted 1,075 little brown myotis. Often aided by professional biologists, regular emergence counts were made between 1997 and 2013, providing potentially invaluable baseline data on WNS-induced population impacts.

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chiroptorium design

World’s First Artificial Bat Cave

Bat Houses, Conservation

World’s First Artificial Bat Cave Provides Model for Future
By Merlin Tuttle
8/14/2016

 

artificial bat cave design
The chiroptorium covers 3,000 square feet (279 square meters) and offers about 8,000 square feet (743 square meters) of likely roosting surface. A structure of welded-together rebar, coated in heavy plastic, was then sprayed with a foot of gunite to form a permanent shell.

Modern bats face a serious housing shortage. Millions of homeless bats have died when their caves were destroyed or converted to exclusive human use, not to mention when old-growth forests were logged. Often, the single most important action we can take to restore bats today is to provide alternative homes.

We know from long experience that desperate bats often readily occupy human-made structures, from abandoned mines and railroad tunnels to old buildings. Though building backyard bat houses is an excellent way to help, sometimes it is very much in our mutual interest to provide long-lasting structures that can accommodate large numbers, not only for pest control, but also for the pure entertainment large colonies can provide.

construction crew at artificial bat cave
Construction crew working in entrance passage. Vertical braces were removed once the gunite hardened.

When J. David Bamberger was first introduced to an evening emergence of the millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) at Bracken Cave in the Texas Hill Country, he was awestruck. He fell in love with this wonder of nature and soon began asking if it would be possible to attract a miniature Bracken colony to his ranch. Undaunted by an absence of caves, he asked me about the feasibility of “building” a cave.  Would bats come? (more…)

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Formosan golden bats of Taiwan

Bat Houses, Conservation, Field Work/Photography

Mr. Chang and mascot of the Formosan Golden Bat's Home

Mr. Chang and mascot of the Formosan Golden Bats’ Home

Following 30 hours of travel, we spent our first day recuperating in Taipei, got up early the next morning for a 2.5-hour drive to the Formosan Golden Bat’s Home on the campus of the Sheng-Zheng Elementary School, where we met our host, 43-year-old Heng-Chia Chang. As a teacher, he had noticed beautiful little golden bats (Myotis formosus flavus) roosting in school yard tree foliage. (more…)

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Finding bat roosts in Trinidad

Field Work/Photography

Our digital and social media coordinator, Teresa Nichta, is learning firsthand the challenges of bat photography, whether in the studio or in the wild. This is her experience in her words.

I already knew I would love the rain forest; it was so massive yet I felt right at home.

Documenting where bats live was a major objective of this trip, and that was just what we did!  Of course, I’d seen Merlin’s photos and learned about what we were looking for but seeing bats at home in the forest in person was even more enthralling than I had imagined. Bats are nearly everywhere but they’re seldom seen because they hide so well. (more…)

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Photographing North America’s Rarest Bat

Bat Houses, Endangered Species, Field Work/Photography
An endangered Florida bonneted bat, America’s rarest bat, once thought to be extinct.

America’s rarest bat, the endangered Florida bonneted bat (Eumops floridanus), was once relatively common. It often lived in tile roofs of Coral Gables and Miami, and its loud, low-frequency echolocation calls made it easy to detect. The species declined sharply in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, and by the late 1970’s extinction was feared. Then in 1978 woodcutters found a male and seven females in a woodpecker cavity. Soon several more were found living in a backyard bat house.

(more…)

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