Baby Bats Given Help

Our local National Park, Cuyahoga Valley, recently had an event highlighting the wonder, importance, and challenges of bats.

Buttons and stickers were distributed like the one to the right with the poignant message, “Bats Need Friends Too!”

While we are in the business of getting bats out of houses, we definitely consider ourselves friends of bats.

Besides having bat houses mounted at his home, our bat expert Ryan has been busy rescuing babies this early summer.

Ryan is definitely a friend of bats. Take a look.

Babies in the Bat Houses This Year

When we perform a bat exclusion at a client’s building, we know that we’ve purposely separated bats from a habitat they found agreeable.

And while we believe keeping bats’ living quarters and people’s living quarters separate is better for bats in the long run, there is always concern in causing habitat loss.

Moving bats out of homes is a good thing in many respects, but there are sure to be a lot more mosquitoes and other flying insects if there are fewer bats about.

As biologists continue to tell us, bats are important players in healthy ecosystems and we need all the bats we can get. Yet, their numbers continue to decline in Ohio because of white nose syndrome and habitat loss.

Consequently, we feel that bat house installation is a great thing we or anyone with the opportunity can do to help these important and valued little mammals.

Ryan put up the bat houses because he 1) likes bats 2) values their insect eating habits and 3) knows they can use a collective helping hand from us humans for good habitats.

His bat houses have colonies living in them because they are in a good spot and are designed to be inviting for bats.

This year, female bats moved in and had babies! Both of his boxes now are hopefully helping sustain fragile bat populations.

Here is Ryan showing off the babies and discussing development.

Sad Fact: Baby Bat Mortality is High

Late last month, Ryan videoed a baby bat he found stranded in an attic and his attempts to give it a chance to get back to the roost.

Did the baby bat make it? Hard to say.

One of the challenges that bats have is a high infant mortality. We are not biologists and can’t give you a thoroughly researched explanation why this is so. But, anecdotally, we will tell you that many bats don’t make it to adulthood. Any inspection of a roost where there was a maternity colony will reveal little bats that didn’t make it.

In fact, since Ryan has a maternal colony at his bat houses this year he has witnessed too many baby bats falling from the roost and getting stranded. He has put some back. Some haven’t made it.

But, since he is a friend of bats, he wanted to do something to help baby bats falling from the bat houses.

So, he fashioned and installed a “baby bat catcher” below his bat houses. Take a look.

This low-tech piece of hardware cloth will, in theory, stop the bats from falling all the way to the ground and give them something to cling to and climb back up to the roost.

Simple, but ingenious. Good luck baby bats.