How To: Build a Bathouse

No, it's not Halloween yet, but it is time to think about bats. Finally, the fall air is cool, crisp, and free of bugs, and building a bathouse is a great way to reduce the number of flying pests year-round. And while bats won't suck your blood, they do love to eat mosquitoes...

The trouble with many commercially available bat houses is that they are just too small to house a colony of bats. And it turns out bats are pretty finicky about temperature, too, so you'll need to select the color for your bathouse depending on where you live because it will affect the temperature inside (dark colors absorb significantly more heat from the sun.)

The step-by-step instructions we found over at the National Wildlife Foundation explain how to make one that's big enough. Sure, it calls for an entire sheet of plywood, but most lumberyards will cut one down for you. (Tip: use a sheet of grooved plywood -- sold for use as house siding -- and skip the step of cutting grooves.) Then all you'll need are common hand tools, some screws, and a tube of caulk.

Another good resource: Bat Conservation International's Guide to Bat Houses.

image by weirdvis via sxc.hu

Comments (1)

I know many many people will disagree with me, and that's okay; and bats are great in the wild, but there are other ways to control mosquitoes; Bats may be clean animals unto themselves but they are carriers, and their guano can grow histoplasmosis. I am speaking as a nurse, and as a parent of a kid who has had chronic respiratory issues-asthma like; the etiology? The bats that had lived in the attic of the house we bought-and yes, I know that my attic and a bat house is different, but bats may pick the bat house, and then decide they like your eaves, or attic or chimney better-we waited for the bats to leave, as they do in the fall, and had the attic cleaned and sealed, our neighbors have basically closed their attic off as they can't afford to get it cleaned right now.

VIROLOGY:
What Links Bats to Emerging Infectious Diseases?

The discovery that bats are the reservoir hosts of the coronavirus that causes SARS in humans

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reported a potentially blinding eye condition â presumed ocular histoplasmosis syndrome (OHS) from bat droppings in roosts, houses and attics

Over the last 50 years, 40 people have died of rabies transmitted by bats in the United States; 34 were adults and 6 were children.
Histoplasmosis is a common, worldwide respiratory illness caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum; bat guano enhances the development of this fungus. Histoplasmosis can cause serious respiratory diseases in humans, causing fever and chest pains. If left untreated, histoplsmosis can turn into a chronic lung disease that resembles tuburculosis. In the very young and the very old, or people who already have cancer, AIDS or other serious illnesses, histoplasmosis can be fatal. Histoplasmosis can also travel from the lungs to the eyes, causing ocular histoplasmosis syndrome, which destroys the central vision (not periphreal). The lung problems can many times be cured with anti-fungal medications, but the ocular disease has no cure.

posted by Rndrc on October 13th 2008 at 2:26pm
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