Bats do so much for us, eating pesky bugs, protecting our crops, and pollinating important plants! The least we can do is not mess things up for them, right? We researched a few of the best ways we can help protect them and their ecosystems. As Bea says, *drumroll, please*…
1. Reduce your use of pesticides! Bats are natural pest-killers, eating up to 3,000 insects a night. But if we kill all the insects, they won’t have anything to eat. Pesticides are also expensive and bad for the ecosystem. Think about how making your yard more bat-friendly can help keep down your mosquitos instead.
2. Use wildlife-friendly lighting, or—best of all—turn off your outdoor and porch lights. LED lights have many benefits, using less energy and emitting less heat, but white LEDs are disruptive to bats’ eyesight and ability to hunt. We don’t use any outdoor lights at our house, and we can generally see just fine! (More on that in another post…)
3. Don’t cut down your dead trees, or snags, as long as they’re not endangering anyone. These are great roosting spots for bats.
4. Build and install a bat house! This would be a cool fall project.
5. Protect your watershed! Speak up about water pollution and protect your streams and rivers so bats have clean water and good foraging areas.
6. This one is hard for us, but: keep your cats indoors at night and at dusk and dawn, when bats are most active. A single cat can decimate a bat colony if she finds a nesting site.
7. Learn more about white-nose syndrome, the disease that has killed millions of bats, and how humans can help prevent its spread.
8. If a bat gets into your house… well, this is tricky. If a bat has been in your house while you’ve been asleep, or near a baby or person who can’t talk—basically if you can’t be sure it didn’t bite someone—you’ll need to trap it and have it tested for rabies (which means the bat will be euthanized). There is only a very small chance that the bat carries rabies, but it’s not a chance you want to take. This happened to us a couple of Thanksgivings ago, and… it was no fun. After that we carefully looked for places the bats might nest or wiggle their way into our house, and sealed them up (steel wool works well for this). Read more about bats and houses here.
9. Read books and stories about bats! Your library will have great nonfiction books, like the DK Readers series, but we also love Stellaluna, and I’m partial to The Bat-Poet, written by Randall Jarrell and illustrated by Maurice Sendak (check out this 1964 NYT review by Elizabeth Hardwick!). Cynthia Rylant’s cozy Gooseberry Park has a great bat character too. And world mythology (Bea’s area of expertise) is full of bats. In Greek and Mayan mythology, bats often symbolized death or the underworld, but in Chinese mythology, bats are symbols of good luck, long life, health, and prosperity. Read more about bats in Chinese art here.
10. Finally, be a bat ambassador! Last night a student in my class wore a T-shirt with an image of a bat and a message: “Protect Our Nocturnal Pollinators.” I asked her about it, and she said as a zoology major, she’s really into pollinators.
You could make buttons or T-shirts to help spread the word—or maybe a bat board game?
Before we go, I wanted to share a photo from an event on NC State’s campus this week announcing the EPA’s new PFAS Strategic Roadmap. EPA Administrator Michael Regan (the first Black man to lead the EPA, a native of North Carolina, a parent, and basically a superhero fighter against PFAS!) spoke at our on-campus fishing pier (!). It was an excellent event. I’ll say more about it, and the fight to hold forever-chemical poisoners accountable, next weekend.
Happy Friday, Frog Troublers! We’ll be out of town without internet this weekend, but we’ll see you next Tuesday with another spooky new animal of the week! Do you have any bat stories, bat tips, or bat books to share? Have you finished your Halloween costumes?
Top ten ways to help bats!
One winter day, I was in the “master bedroom”, tried to put on my shoe and it wouldn’t fit.
I thought, maybe, a wadded-up sock was in it so I thumped it on the floor and a cold, sleeping, bat rolled out !
I took it to work and did “show and tell”. Fun times !
( never could figure out how it got in - but there were plenty of ways, no doubt)
:)
1) If bats get into your house, remediation can be very expensive. As you say, pest exclusion is the way to go. Most companies that provide termite bonds will also throw in pest exclusion (it's not expensive, warrantied for the first year, just decline the annual check thereafter and maintain it yourself.
2) Build and install a bat house! is the best idea, but our bathouse is still waiting five years later for bats to find it :<