I’ve been very pleased to see a few bats flying around the farm after nightfall.
Bats, after all, eat plenty of insects which means that they’re welcome guests at Green Machine Farm.
For starters, I downloaded the 4-chamber nursery bathouse plans [PDF] from Bat Conservation International and got building.
Being a nursery house, it will hopefully help the bats reproduce more. They’re going to need it with the threat of White Nose Syndrome hanging over their collective heads. Bats don’t hibernate in Minnesota to my knowledge, especially in bat houses, so the bat houses shouldn’t be a place where WNS would be transmitted.
Once built and painted, up the ladder it went, to the south side of the barn. There are only a few good sites to place bat houses on our farm buildings, as there aren’t that many South-facing walls.
While I was up there, I did notice some funky business going on under the eaves: Sparrow nests.
As previously noted, I don’t exactly like sparrows. Invasive species and all that…
So they needed to be shut down. Tearing out the nests is easy enough, but how exactly to prevent them from nesting there again?
Expanding spray foam. It’s possibly the best stuff ever.
Nesting sites denied.
Bat house hung.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the bats to move in.
Does it get hot inside the bat house, being black and on the south side of the building? I didn’t know bats like it warm during the day while they rest, but I guess now that I think about it I don’t know much about bats.
I checked on my friends’ cats while they were away and they had killed a little bat inside their house. An exciting time missed by my friends.
Bats like it hot apparently. In Minnesota they recommend painting houses black, down South lighter colors are in order. Apparently you want to shoot for a daytime temp of 100 degrees or so
That’s amazing. I didn’t know any mammal liked it that hot. I always picture bats in caves, but maybe that’s to survive the winter?
I know from reading about white-nose syndrome that they do most of their hibernating in caves. If you’re trying to keep your metabolism down through winter, it’s probably a good idea to go someplace that’s a constant 54 degrees or so. There’s not much I can do to provide any new cave habitat, but I can sure try to give them some nice digs for the summer when all the bat reproduction takes place.