We know we have a lot of bats living above our garage — it’s non-trivial to check, though. There’s an access panel in the garage ceiling and you need to use a ladder to climb up there. But I imagine it might look a little like this if you climbed up and rummaged around behind the insulation.
I think maybe we’ll leave our bat colony alone.
PZ, you think you’ve got bats? Just look at all the bats in the D.C. belfry running this country!
p.s. We had two bats hanging under eaves at our front door. They were making a mess on the ground. We didn’t want to harm them, so I used our electric leaf blower to get them to fly away. They seem to remember where they encountered unpleasant conditions and haven’t returned for over year.
I had a problem with bats using my pool umbrella when it was closed up as a roost. Kind of exciting when I opened it up during the day. Probably not good to disturb them in the day. Left the umbrella open for a while to encourage new lodgings.
couldn’t guano eat a hole through your house?
I put a bat box on the side of my house last year. Only wasps took up residence. I’m not one of those people who hates wasps and kills them at every opportunity. I figure it’s their planet too. But I do have a healthy respect for them. All in all, I would prefer to have bats instead. I see them flitting about at dusk and wonder where they roost.
The way I see it, anything that eats mosquitos is a friend of mine… do bats eat mosquitos?
That said, I don’t have mosquito netting, but now that it’s summer and all my windows are open, a very friendly spider put one up in my kitchen window! Little orange guy, I’ve spotted him a few times at dusk repairing his web, (s)he’s very diligent about keeping it in shape.
robert79 — We have a “rustic” cabin…meaning no water, not power…in the California Gold Country. In the late afternoon and early evening the mosquitos can be horrendous this time of year. I moved to San Francisco from northeast Florida and was elated to discover that in SF mosquitos are rare, but in the hill country when it’s warm it’s a very different story. Anyway, at the cabin once the sun went down the bats came out in droves swarming through the yard and porch, and the mosquitos disappear. I couldn’t prove the bats ate the mosquitos, but I believe they did.
Was hiking in Hermit canyon in the Grand canyon and had a tent site in the creek canyon under the overhang. If was March so there was water in the creek even with the temperature in the 90’s (snow on the rim.) Mosquitos got real bad at dusk, then suddenly, hundreds of bats came out from under the overhang. Instantly, bug free for the night.
Had a sad bat encounter this spring. Little Brown Bat was flying erratically around in front of our (extremely remote and rural) house, I figure it woke up a bit early and was exhausted and hungry. It eventually ended up lying on top of one of our deck posts, breathing heavily. We were quite careful not to touch the poor thing, and I fabricated a little hut for it to protect it from hawks and other predators, but giving it a little window to hopefully crawl out of if it regained its strength. Left some water and food under the hut with it, but it was dead the next day.
Bats often roost under our window casings, and other than sometimes making me think we’ve got rodents, they don’t do any harm. Amazing little creatures, but so fragile.
They look like they’re coming off a three day bender.
I see them all the time on one of my regular hiking trails but I’d really have to draw the line at having them in the house. They’re actually kind of cute flying around at twilight. Up close though, that’s a face only a mother could love.
In UK (and similar in EU) bats have significant legal protection. If you have them, you can’t even disturb them. Suits me fine, I like to sit in the garden at dusk when they are flying about hoovering up midges…
There is a place in Germany where a new railway line is being constructed, over a distance of maybe 50km. There are bats living there who now have to be safely relocated, it’s part of European environmental laws. So this has cost the state involved so far 220 million Euros, utter madness.
Btw, bats in the house are not a good thing at all, because they are such great virus reservoirs. Approach with FFP2 mask only if you want to clean them out.
Bats in the house are a mixed blessing for sure. For many years we had large numbers of them in the inaccessible half-story attic here, because like many houses here in Vermont it’s got a slate roof and porous decking, and bats can fly right through it. It was no big deal for some years, and they were fun to watch. IN addition, we were never plagued with mosquitoes! Then eventually they figured out how to get down into the walls, and the bat nursery became both noisy and stinky in the upstairs hall, unfortunately behind a bunch of built in bookcases backed by old wallboard. So we had to rip out the whole wall, and clear out the piles of guano and stuff, quite a chore. During the early spring before the bats returned from their caves, I then covered the entire roof of the house wit 1/4 inch bird netting. Sure enough, the bats did not return, but went instead to the nearby barn, where they happily resettled and all was well. The next year the whitenose disease hit and no bats returned. A few “big brown” bats have returned but the little browns are gone forever, it seems. And the mosquitoes are back.
Bats are nice but hard to live with. We also had to put screening on all the hot air registers in the house, because they would occasionally get into the ducts and emerge in random places throughout the house. One fall the furnace failed to start, because a bat had come down the chimney, worked its way through the flues, and perished trying to get out through the oil burner.