HOW TO ATTRACT BATS

After many years of building houses for myself and my friends with not a house to date occupied the bats have taken up, in a home, of their choosing.

We bought and set up a new patio table and umbrella. Yep......the dern fools like to crawl up into the folded umbrella. Try as I might to discourage them from pooping all over the picnic table they continued to return at dawn. Presently I am spreading newspaper to catch the droppings. Seems the only other option is to leave the umbrella open. To much wind here to do that.

Where ever else they stay is a mystery. It is not in the properly built and placed boxes we made for them. Go figure. LOL

ROFL, that's beautiful, Docgipe! I've wanted to put up bat houses here myself, but have been discouraged by stories such as your own, where the bats took no interest in the specially-built houses.

Still, I think we'll give it a whirl...

Hi, Docgipe!! That's cute about the umbrella lure.....wonder how they knew to go under there, but can't find the bat house opening?? I wonder if cloth has anything to do with it?? I recall that , Dracula liked window drapes.

We put up a bat house about 4 years ago now and we see lots of them flying around at night, but there's no clue that they've ever stuck their heads up the crevice yet. Another DGer told me that it took about 5 years for the bats to "find" her bat house. So, I'm still hoping....watching. I started a thread over in the wildlife gardening a while back.

So, would you suggest a broken beach umbrella to bat people??

Broken umbrella......heck no. It has to be an expensive brand new one to keep up with the present stated trend.

We have had three bat houses......up in the neighborhood for at least the past ten years. None of us has ever seen a bat enter or leave the houses. We all have bats in the air nightly. I built two of these three houses to specs by our State Conservation Department's Game Department. The third house was mail order purchased. The design and placement is to provided advise at the Southeast eve of our house. All three have been painted black again tothe spec. Take down the bat house, make a 7/8: hole in the ventilation screen and I guarentee you will have bats in the attic in short order.

The bats have another self choice colony at our house. I put a galvenized roof over a temporary tar paper roof on my out-shed. To provide air movement under the galvanized roof we used firing strips. They provided the exact spec for bat entry holes. They stay there in summer. It is dark, spacious, dry and hot. This is what they apparently like. They by choice enter at about the seven foot height along the edge of the roof. None of this of course even leans towards suggested placement of the craft made bat houses or design either.

Mine is up under a decorative shutter on the front of our house. We only knew it by the tell-tale guano. lol

Doc, DH and I have been wondering why we never see bats here. There certainly are plenty of insects and we see Martins and Tree Swallows in spring and early summer. Last evening we sat down to dinner at sunset in front of our large kitchen window and much to my surprise, there outside was the undeniable outline of a bat against the gray coulds, flying in that erratic way they do. In an instant a hawk came out of nowhere and smashed into the bat and kept right on flying to the tree line. We were amazed first to see the bat and second to see the hawk flying at that time of the evening. We're not sure whether the hawk actually knocked the bat out of the sky, but some fur did fly! I suspect where there is one bat, there are more. We gave up on our beautifully built cedar bat house after about ten years in Orlando. The house was still as empty as day one, while down the road at the University, they were trying to rid the Engineering building of 10,000 of the critters.

Doc,

My DH recently spoke to an exterminator about bats that are living in our barn. We are making a workshop out of that area of the barn and don't want the bat droppings in there due to the diseases they carry. We don't want to kill the little critters, just move them.

We were told to put up bat houses and after they leave for the winter, gather to smear some of the "guano" onto the outside of the houses. They are apparently attracted by "their own scent" to the same place next year. Before smearing the guano, he said to soak the house in water first and apply the guano while wood is still wet so that the scent soaks into the wood.

Bats creep me out, but we sure don't have much of a mosquito problem.

Pamgarden, I have visions of 10,00 bats all trying to get into your cedar bat house. lol

Suzieq, thanks for the info about smearing the guano somewhere else. Who'da thunk it?

Goodness sakes alive.......a bat guano poopers smell used to attract them. Nothing else has worked but this has possible merit. I shall try the poopers smear. We use bat guano in our gardening and stock it here all of the time. Now we get into individual odors that may be different from one species to another.

I promise I will not tell a soul about this experimentation......unless it works. Harr Harr

Doc, just use some of the droppings they've been leaving on your nice picnic table under the umbrella...

So far we have one female. She leaves us with about three or four small gains of poop per day. It would take a pile the size of a marble to make a smear of merit. Maybe if we put out some castor oil it would help us collect a smear with an artist's brush.

Windex makes it smear but then it smells like windex. Mercy this could be an involved situation. I take it that this smear must be pure and natural so as not to harm their ability to smell their own poopers. If I work this right maybe there is a government grant out there on the subject of bat poopers and scoupers, their implimentation and use to attract the Little Brown Bat.

LOL... the way you were talking about covering the table with newspaper, I was envisioning a much more serious guano situation.

DocG, You get my vote for the funniest thread of the day! LOL

First, I was envisioning a pile of poop on the picnic table, then you out with a gas mask, rubber gloves up the the elbows, goggles and hazmat suit, scooping it up. Next vision, you outside grabbing bats in your hazmat suit sexing them. How do you determine the sex of a bat ? Vvvvvvvvvveryyyyyyyyyy, carefully.

Seriously, we do get an occasional bat in the house, never did until our neighbor put a new roof on his house, it was a bat haven over there, you could stand outside at dusk and watch at least a dozen exit from his roof. Then the church sealed up their belfry with glass panels. So the bats were displaced.
Hubby has been up in the attic but have not found any roosting up there or any droppings. We have a lot of old trees in the area, that is where many of them come from.
Good luck!

TOO FUNNY!

ROTFLMBO....ok...but I THOUGHT that bat poo was good for plants? Put some in the house...some in the flower bed...no? LOL ^_^

You guys are too funny! We haven't tried re-locating our bats yet. Will work on new houses this winter. We will let you know how/if it works.

Another interesting thing we learned is that bat houses need to be fairly high off the ground. This is because when they "take off" they descend. If they land on the ground, the are pretty helpless and not well equipped to get up in the air again.

How on earth do you tell if a bat is male or female. I don't want to get close enough to find out.

Silly, a male bat lifts his leg to pee!! Don't cha know? Teasing...I have no earthly idea!!

LOL

The following may end this thread.....but I could not resist. Credit is herein given to a book and it's writer. Sink your teeth into this jewel!

ENDOCRINOLOGY OF REPRODUCTION IN BATS: CENTRAL CONTROLL, Edythe L. P. Anthony.

QUOTE: One of the most compelling questions addressed by bat physiologests today is how neruroendocrine mechanisms support the diverse array of reproductive patterns that have evolved within the chepteran order. It is assumed, that in bats, as in all mammals studied, gametogenic and steroidogentic activities of the gonads are regulated by hormones of the anterior pituitary gland. Secretion of pituitary hormones is controlled by the hypothalamus, which in turn is influenced by hormonal milieu as well as by neural pathways orginating in other areas of the bat's brain. UNQUOTE

Amazon.com will gladly sell you the rest of the story in a used out of print copy of this book for a mere $300 and change.

Faithfull promise: I will not say another word about bats. ]:o)

Ahhaaahhhahahahahaa!! Best thread of the day by far!!

Just imagine you need a rule of thumb for all manures and you did not have the web to research.

Dehydrated manures.................................two tablespoons per gallon of water
Raw fresh chicken.....................................one tablespoon per gallon of water
Dried chicken.............................................one half tablespoon per gallon of water
Raw fresh cow or horse............................one tablespoon per gallon of water
Worm casts................................................two tablespoon per gallon of water
Dehydrated kelp.........................................one half teaspoon per gallon of water
Processed fish...........................................one to two ounces per gallon of water
Dehydrated fish..........................................one half teaspoon per gallon of water
Fresh deer, bear, rabbit.............................one tablespoon per gallon of water
Fresh Llama beans....................................one tablespoon per gallon

To make a dandy tea add one ounce of Black Strap Molasses (cattle grade), shake well, loosen container cap, set in shade for three weeks shaking the tea to add oxygen and add quality mycro herd development during the fermentation time. Use these teas once a week instead of water. This is good fertilizer being added slowly and carefully for any plant inside your house or outside. These teas are worthless more of less if mixed with man made harsh chemical fertilizers.

Can't help saying another word about bats. Back on 9/9 DH and I saw a single bat get knocked out of the sky by a hawk. There was just one bat...and we haven't seen once since, until last evening at dusk when we saw just one bat. Earlier in the day the farmer had mown the fields and I'll bet there were plenty of goodies to be had. This bat was larger than the little ones we were used to seeing in Orlando. I always assumed that where there was one bat, there were many. What do you think?