If you don’t have all of Eric’s power tools, not to worry: hand tools and a bit more elbow grease will work just fine. And if you’d rather skip all that, you can always buy a bat house ready-made.

There’s many benefits to having a bat house, not least the sheer neatness of having them around. (Trivia time: bats are more closely related to elephants than rodents; some can live for up to 30 years; and they represent one-fifth of all mammal species on Earth.) And they’ve achieved such spectacular evolutionary success by exploiting a basic, extraordinarily useful ecological niche: they eat insects at night, in the air.

If you’re a gardener, they might eat your pests. And though mosquitoes are not a major part of bat diets, they’ll often eat whatever flies near their home, said Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist Cal Butchkoski. Before putting a pair of bat boxes in his backyard, Butchkoski says he couldn’t sit on the porch in the summer. Now he’s there every evening.

Unfortunately, Butchkoski’s backyard population has dropped from 1000 to about 400 as a result of White Nose Syndrome, a virulent bat-killing disease. (To learn more, see my citizen-funded Spot.us White Nose Syndrome story.) There’s no cure for this disease — which doesn’t affect humans, so don’t worry about getting infected — but by having bat boxes around, you could make the bats’ lives that much easier. That extra boost could help get them through winter, when the disease hits hardest.

At this point in the year, most cave-dwelling bats are already underground and getting to hibernate, but it’s still a good time to put them up. Butchkoski said they make scouting runs in the fall, looking for places to roost next spring.

“They evolved dealing with trees, and trees fall down. We think that once the young bats start flying, they start checking out other roosts. Often there will be just one or two in late November or early December. Then the next spring, a large number moves in,” said Butchkoski.

Video: Eric Rochow

See Also:

• Bat Disease Threatens to Close America’s Caves
• Controversy Erupts Over Captive Endangered Bat Colony
• America’s Most Common Bat Headed for Eastern Extinction
• Bats Use Sun to Calibrate Geomagnetic Compass
• Infrared Video: 500000 Bats Emerge From Cave

Brandon’s Twitter stream, reportorial outtakes and citizen-funded White Nose Syndrome story; Wired Science on Twitter.

Authors: Brandon Keim

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