Providing shelter for bats can help keep insect populations down. And the key to a good bat house is simple: location, location, location.
Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
If you're starting to make plans for the fall, don't forget your wild neighbors too.
It seems like everyone is feeding birds these days, but what about providing for another useful animal, like our native bats?
Bats don't need help with food as much as shelter, and now is a good time to think about how you can attract bats to your yard next summer.
Putting up bat shelters is simple and can result in having a lot fewer insects buzzing around next year.
A single little brown bat, the species you're most likely to attract in New Hampshire, can eat 1200 mosquito-sized insects an hour. According to some biologists, that's like a human eating sixty pizzas a day!
The key to convincing bats to move into your housing, like all real estate, is location, location, location. Where you place the box is critical. Most bat houses are really bat nurseries, and baby bats need warmth. So you need to place your bat abode someplace where they will receive at least six to eight hours of direct sunlight a day. And bat houses placed on buildings or poles are much more likely to be occupied than houses placed on trees. They should be at least 15 feet off the ground.
Bats also need something to grab onto, so if you pick up a store-bought bat house, make sure it has a rough interior and exterior. After poor sighting, houses that are too slippery are often one of the problems that keep bats from moving in.
Bats will soon be migrating to their wintering grounds, so this is still a good time of year to put up housing. They'll often check out new roosts on their travels, with next season in mind.
Plus, many garden centers are having end of season sales, so you can help the bats and save some money too!
Something Wild is a joint production of the New Hampshire Audubon Society, NHPR and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
For Something Wild, I'm Rosemary Conroy.
