Last year in anticipation of the coming Spring I wrote a blog about Pennsylvania bats (February24, 2012). I was hopeful that some bats would come to live in my two year old but never occupied bat house (they didn’t….they didn’t come this year either), and I outlined the horror and devastation of the fungal infection (“white nose syndrome”) that was killing bats by the millions throughout Eastern North America.
(Image: Little Brown Bat. USFWS/ Ann Froschaner)
This morning two unconnected events made me think more about bats.
The first was an article on the Penn State Newswire that described the small numbers of bats observed this year at the Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center near State College. The Center’s bat houses which in past years had sheltered large numbers of bats contained only three individuals this Spring. White nose syndrome and the immense winter die-off that it triggers was the cause of this staggering decline in these important animals.
A single bat will eat between three hundred to three thousand insects a night according to the Newswire article. A million bats, according to the Wisconsin Bat Monitoring Program, eat six hundred and ninty-four tons of insects a year! That’s a lot of mosquitoes and potential crop pests! The Newswire article cited estimates that a farmer in our bat-deprived world would have to spend between four and five thousand dollars a year on pesticides just to achieve the insect pest control that the bats had provided for free.
The second reminder about bats came right after reading the Newswire article. My neighbor called to tell us that a bat had flown into her house late the night before. She had closed it off in a room and hoped that Deborah and I could help get it out of her house. We went right over but after an hour of carefully searching the room could not find the bat. We assumed that it was tucked into a tiny space and was probably fast asleep. We decided to go back over in the evening when the bat would get active so that we could either coax it back out a window or gently capture it and release it back into the open.
You have to be careful with bats. They are very delicate and easy to accidentally injure. They may also try to scratch or bite in their confusion and fear of being in a strange environment. Leather gloves, long sleeves and pants, lidded containers, nets, or soft towels should always be used when handling bats. There is a nice, although, to my taste, excessively cute, web site with very solid information about dealing with bats that have entered your house (www.wikihow.com/Catch-a-Bat-in-Your-House).
Rabies is a common worry when dealing with bats, although the percentage of bats carrying that disease has been historically over-estimated. In a recent study researchers at the University of Calgary, for example, found that only one percent of the individuals in their tested bat populations carried the rabies virus (Science News, March 22, 2011).
Anyway, to finish the bat in the house story: about 7:15 yesterday evening our neighbor called to say that the bat was flying around in her kitchen (it had, apparently, not been confined to the one room and had probably slept the day away in a hidden niche somewhere else in the house!). We went right over and found the bat (a little brown bat) in her sink, lapping up some droplets of water. I gently put a soft towel over him (I was also wearing leather work gloves) and folded the towel to encase him. I then carried him out to the side of the house, set the towel down on the ground and unfolded it. Very quickly the little bat emerged, stretched his wings, and then flew off. He circled around the house several times before settling himself in a spruce tree about 30 yards away. I assume that he was waiting for dusk so that he could re-join his flock for their nightly moth and mosquito hunt!
Many people react to bats with fear and loathing, but it is important to put those kinds of emotions aside. They are an endangered and incredibly important part of our ecosystems. They need our help to survive and will pay back our efforts many times over!
Bats are not flying mice; they are not even remotely related to rodents. Bats are such unique animals that scientists have placed them in a group all their own, called ‘Chiroptera’, which means hand-wing.
Bats are not blind. Most bats can see as well as humans. Fruit bats have eyesight that is adapted to low-light, much like cats. Fruit bats also see in color.
Bats do not try to become tangled in hair. In fact, insect-eating bats are equipped with a built in sonar system that allows them to navigate at break-neck speed through total darkness. Their unique echolocation ability is literally thousands of times more efficient than any similar system built by humans. If a bat swoops toward you, it’s probably after the mosquito that is hovering just above your head – not your hair.