Bats eat their weight in mosquitoes every night, unlike your typical hoa board member
My parents attic was a bat haven. Every once in awhile one would get into the house. I'd just put thick leather garden gloves on and GENTLY pluck them off the curtains. Then carry them outside, hold them above my head and let them go.
Bats can't take flight from the ground(putting them on the ground is a death sentence), so you have to give them some height so they can glide away. Just thought I'd share this in case anyone gets a bat trapped in their house.
Also unless you know for certain they haven't touched you, get rabies shots. Actually just get rabies shots anyway.
Yes, make sure they don't get on you.
If the bat isn't afraid of people call animal control because it is sick with rabies or something and shut it in the room it's in. Usually they are very timid and will try to get away from you though.
I should've added that rabies is very rare in bats where I am so that's probably why I was given the advice I was.
Thank you, I had no idea.
Looks like at least one type can take flight from the ground, although with some difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIl_bYFMr8o
death sentence seems a bit excessive, surely they can climb? Yeah putting them on the ground probably makes it much more likely they'll get nabbed by a predator before they get up a tree, but it feels like saying "putting a human in a tree is a death sentence"
I'm simply repeating what I was told by professionals, so I'm not sure what you want from me.
Make sure the bat takes flight...some people might not know that and just put it on the ground and go back inside thinking it's fine.
Holding it up high ensures it does that, no need for it to find something to climb. Being trapped in a house is stressful on the little guys so why not give them the best chance?
Just trying to provide helpful info to folks.
Have a nice day!
Interesting note on not putting on the ground, guessing they don't need a lot of runway to take off though. The ones I've caught I would bring out in whatever I caught them in and just open it. Even the one that had a part of the wing skin missing (my cat caught it first) seemed to take off without issue from a standing height.
So, after you build this Bat Roost, how do you tell the local bat population that you're open for business .. asking for .. a friend, purely for .. educational purposes.
Bats are incredibly picky about their roosts. People have done this and attracted 0 bats lol.
And other people just have a million bats living in their attic
It helps if you actually live near bats.
I came home to a small ball of fluff and wings wrapped up in the corner of my porch one day, so for gits and shiggles I put up a small bat box on a post against the trees nearby.
It took a week or two but I noticed it was in use when I went outside one night and saw one pop out of it.
Protip: be very careful about what you use to stain/paint it. Apparently they don't like the smell of those things. I didn't paint mine.
Bats need a real estate agent...
I guess like any other animals, bats will seek places with other bats, or where bats lived before. The best option would be to procure a pair of domesticated bats and put them into the roost, I'm not sure if it's even legal. The next best choice is to acquire a few kilograms of bat shit, and spray it all over and inside your roost, so it smells like bat.
If you build it, they will come.
We've built a little urban utopia for our pollinator friends. The little guys just started popping up when the flowers started blooming.
I would consider this a service to the neighborhood. More bats, fewer mosquitoes.
But they're black so HOAs hate them.
In my village in the Netherlands bat roosts are installed in a bunch of places, they also mandate that houses have little box things on their side for them. Never seen a single bat lmao, but in the old family house in France there's a bunch in the attic.
It's important to build the right kind of roost for the bats in your area
Check https://www.batcon.org/ for guidance and inspiration
This is very true. Artificial refugia can act as animal traps by encouraging predators to exploit them, or by promoting desired animal use, but exposing them to thermal extremes.
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/csp2.204
Poked through the site a bit and found the direct link to the Bat House Builder's Handbook for anyone else interested!
I love my local bats! It's fun watching them under the street lights at night.
Nobody complains about bats, bats are awesome and hard to notice anyway
that last bit tells me you're either old or have hearing damage: we have some bats around me and despite never once seeing them it's plainly obvious to me that they exist thanks to their shrill squeaky calls in the twilight.
I live in an HOA (obligatory Fuck them)
They put up numerous bat boxes on poles around the common wooded area and a large retention pond right about the time Covid started.
Main reason is it’s free insect killers. We have tons of pests anyway being so close to a wooded area and a lake + the retention pond we have and the added bats help to clear some of them out.
As for the noise, no you really don’t hear them here. All the frogs are the loudest things heard of a night.
Some species of bats spend more time in the upper ranges that no human can hear than others.
The spotted bat for instance, is found on west coast if North America and mostly calls at 11khz well within even older human hearing while other bats operate entirely outside human hearing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=X4eqkaHkTAI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That thing's bigger than my house!
You have a house?!?! Must be nice.
Tfw the bats can afford higher rent than you can
You should buy one
Get your rabies shots.
It's really sad and unfair that bats are a common vector for rabies because they're so cute and sweet and important to the ecosystem
Which country?
Home Owner Associations are a US thing, I think.
I imagine they'd just force you to do what I had to do to rid myself of bats from my home, seal all of the doors of the roost for 1 years with 1 way doors(so they can freely leave) then after that year you would then be clear to remove the structure
