Bats

[Chuck White]

I built a bathouse yesterday and gave it to my MIL.

At first she started complaining about she hates bats flying around, then I asked what she hated the most, mosquitos & black flies, or bats!

She said she has to paint a bat on the front of it, then put it up in the gable end of their garage!

[KEC]

You can easily make a fuctional bat box to put under a roof overhang. Cut a piece of scrap plywood (3/8" or 1/2" is fine) about 1 foot wide and ~2' long. Cut some 1" full thickness pieces of lumber into 1 1/2" strips, about 6 linear feet will do. Staple a piece of fiberglass fly screen to one side of the plywood, bats love to cling to it. Now nail or screw a 2' piece of the 1x2 along one edge of the plywood on the side with the flyscreen. Cut 2 pieces of 1x2 about 6" long and fasten them along the edge of the ends of the plywood. Now cut 2 pcs. of 1x2 and fasten these to connect between the 2 shorter pieces, but leave a 2" gap in the middle. Now cut a piece of plywood to just cover the 1x2's and fasten it to the 1x2's. Put it up under the roof overhang of a barn, shed, house or whatever. No worry about the weather as it should stay dry. The gap in the 1x2's goes facing down. You may want to put a 6" long piece of 1x2 inside about 2" above the gap/entry hole to keep it dark inside. Hope I explained this OK, it is really simple and you can make it longer to hold more bats. I have given some to people and they got bats in them. I don't think the bats care for the boxes that resemble a bird box. Let us know if you build a box and get bats. Oh, the bats fly up, land on the exposed flyscreen and crawl through that gap and up to the top. They seem to have an uncanny knack for finding that entry hole.

[SwampDonkey]

Wow, another 7 years and the bat house is still up on that post. ;D  14 years now.

[aigheadish]

I have an aunt and uncle who used to live in a house which backed up to a school yard. In that school yard were probably 10 crabapple trees. We'd go back there around dusk with sharp sticks, jam the sticks into rotting apples that had fallen from the trees and fling them into the sky, where relatively big bats would often catch them in mid-air. Too cool!

[Will.K]

I hold my hand in the air and click my fingernails to make insect sounds and provoke a dive.