Mexican gratuitous-tailed bats and a few evening bats are in flying near this bat house in the Bibin Orchard, Quitman, GA
Mark & Selena Kiser

How to attract bats to your backyard

Bats are an important function of a functioning ecosystem. Making a bat-friendly place in your backyard supports the ecologically essential role bats accept in the environment, including pest-command, pollination and seed dispersal.

Plus, their nightly displays of aerial acrobatics are fascinating to observe.

4 easy means to be lawn 'bat friendly'

Help Bats

  • Install a bat firm.

    Setting up a bat house about your home is a great fashion to get involved in protecting bats. Plus, it provides yous with the opportunity to observe bats' fascinating behavior. Run across below for data on purchasing or edifice your own bat firm.

  • Don't tear down that dead tree.

    For many bat species, dead trees are like a comfy lodge or beach house – a bang-up hangout spot. Some bats like to squeeze between the narrow, crude space between the tree bark and woods, while others seek out tree hollows to roost. If a dead tree does non pose a safe or property concern, consider leaving information technology continuing.

  • Don't use pesticides. (Bats are natural pest controllers.)

    Avert the use of pesticides in your garden and the use of remedial timber treatment agents in structures. Both can lead to the poisoning of bats. Consider bats in your backyard and neighborhood every bit natural pest control. Insectivorous bats devour amazing quantities of dark-flying insects.  In fact, pregnant or nursing mothers of some bat species frequently consume almost their torso weight in insects each night.

  • Go along cats indoors.

    Cats and bats don't mix. Menstruum. Cat attacks are one of the nearly common causes of bat (and bird) casualties. Proceed your cat indoors at nighttime, especially during summer months when bat mothers are feeding their young. Brand certain your true cat is indoors a half hour before dusk and a half hr after sunset when bats are well-nigh agile. If your true cat finds a bat, it may larn where the roost is located, which places an entire colony at hazard.

Mexican free-tailed bats roost and raise young in standard bat houses suspended from the ceiling of a barn in Solano Canton, California
Mylea Bayless

Buy or build a bat house

Where optimal natural environments for bats are limited, installing a bat business firm is meaningful and a corking way to connect to the world of bat conservation. The choice is yours: build or buy?

Workshop participants gather a bat house nether the pedagogy of Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist, Cal Butchkoski
Janet Tyburec

Build

Bat Conservation International offers three downloadable designs. Download Gratis designs here.

  • four-sleeping accommodation
  • rocket boxes
Vishu Vishuma

Buy

For-purchase bat houses can exist found and purchased online.  Nevertheless, it's important to know that bat boxes must meet certain criteria to be effective.  Employ the following criteria to evaluate your buy:

  • A bat house should be at least 24" loftier x xvi" wide. Smaller bat houses do non offer adequate thermal stability.
  • A bat house should non comprise textile or mesh. Roosting boards and landing pads should consist of roughened wood.

Installation Tips

Bat houses are used to attract bat colonies to walnut orchards in California equally ane component of an integrated pest management plan
Mylea Bayless

Bat Conservation International conducted a 10-year written report to confirm all-time practices and provides you with guiding tips on where to locate and install your bat house(s).

Retrieve, these are guiding tips. You should non be discouraged from installing a bat firm if all conditions cannot be met.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Where should I place my bat house?

    • Bats adopt roosts mounted on buildings or other large wooden or concrete structures rather than roosts mounted on poles or trees.
    • Pole mounts tin can piece of work well in moderate to hot climates that do not feel extreme temperature swings between twenty-four hour period and night.
    • Tree mounts should be avoided. They are vulnerable to predation and almost always too shaded.
    • Bat houses should receive at to the lowest degree vi hours of daily sun exposure.
    • Bat houses should take a nearby h2o source, preferably less than a quarter-mile abroad.

  • How high? And what about trees?

    • The bottom of bat houses should be located 10 feet off the ground. Twelve to 20 feet off the ground is even better.
    • Bat houses should have 10-14 feet of clear infinite in a higher place whatever vegetation below the bat house
    • Bat houses should be mounted xx to 30 feet from the nearest trees.

  • What about more one roost?

    • Bats are more than likely to move into a grouping of three or more roosts.
    • Multiple bat houses tin can be mounted side-by-side on buildings and structures or mounted back-to-dorsum on poles.
    • Some bat house owners number bat houses to identify roosts.
    • Some paint northward-facing bat houses a lite color and s-facing roosts a night color.

  • What should I pay attention to when edifice my bat house?

    • Be sure to carefully seal all the seams. Bat houses work best when they finer trap warm air. It makes the temperatures more stable
    • Be sure to roughen the roosting boards and landing pads.
    • Avert using oil-based paints and stains.

  • If yous install it, will they come?

    Installing a bat house does not guarantee that bats will roost.  Seasonal migration, geographic location, local availability of other roosts, specific roosting behaviors and presence of predators in the surface area all take an influence on utilise of bat houses.

    If you don't see bats using your bat house you may be able to find local experts to help you evaluate your placement and structure. Unfortunately, BCI does not have staff to answer specific bat house questions.

  • Should I mount my bat business firm on a pole or on a building?

    Rocket boxes work only on poles but the 3-four chambered houses we recommend work best ideally on a building (but can be put on a pole besides).  A edifice offers a more consistent temperature than a pole mount.

  • What blazon of siding should my building accept if I am trying to install a bat house?

    Wood, brick, and stone siding piece of work the all-time. Bat houses mounted on metal siding rarely attract bats.

  • I accept bats in my house. How do I get them into my bat house, outside?

    If you take a colony of bats in your attic or walls, it may exist necessary to exclude the bats. Please see a discussion of bat exclusion here: https://www.batcon.org/about-bats/bats-in-homes-buildings/. Though there is no guarantee that excluded bats will move into your bat business firm, installing ane equally far in advance of the exclusion as possible will maximize the chance of a positive outcome Bats should only be excluded when bat pups are not present, usually in the early spring or tardily fall, to avoid trapping  flightless young inside.

  • What color should I pigment my bat house?

    The color you lot should pigment your bat firm doesn't matter as much as the shade of that colour.  This varies based on your area and its climate, equally the different colors absorb different amounts of heat. Average high temperatures in July should be used when determining the color needed on your bat box:

    85 or less: Black
    85-95: Dark or medium colors like chocolate-brown, gray, and green
    95-100: Medium/light colors
    100 and higher: Light colors or white

  • What kind of paint should I employ to paint my bat business firm?

    Any kind of outside-course paint is fine if it's not oil-based – only employ water-based paints.   For the inside we recommend 2 coats of water-based stain (exercise not use paint since it will fill in the grooves).

  • I want to put up a bat house, but I'm worried about rabies.

    We completely empathise your concern about rabies and bats.  The truth is that any wild mammal can bear rabies (then the squirrels in your yard, raccoons, foxes, rabbits etc.).  Bats do not carry or have rabies any more than than any other wild mammals.   The main thing to recollect is that if you lot run across a bat on the basis it's all-time to use common sense (like you would with any wild animal).  Tell your kids to come become you and not effort to touch them or option them upwards.  If you do option them up and accept them to a rehabber you lot want to exist certain to vesture gloves the whole fourth dimension.  The benefits of having a bat business firm far outweigh the very small risk of having a rabid bat in your yard.  They swallow lots of bugs (including mosquitos) and are very of import for our ecosystem.  Bats are losing roost sites everyday due to human being disturbances and urbanization, so providing a bat house is a great mode to help them!

  • Why do you no longer recommend the unmarried chamber bat firm?

    We found the larger houses with more chambers much more successful. That doesn't mean that a single-chamber firm wouldn't work merely we feel that the larger houses provide more meaningful habitat to the bats.