Bat Houses

Mosquitoes here at the lake are HORRIBLE right now. They have been HORRIBLE for at least ten days already. I can tolerate them up to a point, but they do seem to like my tasty self, and even with repellant, I accumulate more bites than I'd like. We have been waiting for the dragonflies to hatch, but they have been slow in arriving. Dragonflies eat lots of mosquitoes! Bats are also good mosquito hunters, and so I've tried to encourage populations of them around our property.

We have had a couple of bat houses fastened to the back side of one of our lake home garages for several years, and I know there is a small population of bats living in them. Last winter, I built two new houses based on a design promoted by the Organization for Bat Conservation. I encourage you to become familiar with them by visiting their website located here. They have lots of interesting information about bats, threats to them, and efforts to protect them. Bat populations have been threatened in recent years because of a white nose syndrome disease and general public ignorance about the benefits of bats. Also, there are books and bat house plans available on their website.

Anyway, the current mosquito unpleasantness has motivated me to get my two new houses put up. I'm not sure I picked a perfect location, but the guidelines suggest having them near water and open enough so that bats will have free flyways to and from the houses. Kathie and I agreed to try putting them about halfway down the slope to the lake. If this doesn't prove to be an ideal location, we'll relocate them someday.

I started by constructing a pole arrangement using a twelve foot 4x4 sandwiched between two eight foot 4x4s. The main pole is fastened with two threaded rods, so that I can remove one in order to swing the top of the pole down for maintenance or other reasons. Everything is made of cedar, including the houses, which are lined with a screen that will facilitate the bats entering and clinging to the interior surfaces.

Next, I dug a hole. (Thanks, Rob, for donating a post hole digger to me. I used it for the majority of this part of the job.)

Next, I lowered the contraption into the hole, and ...

straightened it up.

Tighe guarded the two houses (black things in the background) and watched me work but wasn't very helpful in keeping the mosquitoes away while I worked. He snaps at them when he sees them in the house, but there are just too many outside, I guess. I had slathered on a good batch of repellant, but between sweating some of it off and the mosquitoes' general preference for my tastiness, I was still swarmed by them.

I tamped the loose dirt back into the four-foot-deep hole, again making sure I had the rig nice and straight.

Then I removed one of the threaded rods and lowered the main pole back down so that I could fasten the two houses to opposite sides of the pole.

To be honest, at this point, I gave up for the day, because the bugs were just too oppressive.

This morning, I got back to work, finishing the task of bolting the two houses to the pole. Then I raised it back up, reinserted the threaded rod, added washers and nuts on each side, and snugged everything up. Here is the end result.

Now, I need to figure out how to attract a nice, big population of bats. The houses I built can each hold several hundred bats, or so the plans claim! I can hang out a vacancy sign. Maybe I could label it a bat bed and breakfast place, since there is lots of food around. Or, maybe I can pipe some macho male bat sounds and/or desirous female bat sounds from a small speaker on the pole. Any suggestions you may have about capturing the attention of bats needing a home are most welcome. I just want the mosquito eating to commence.