I am always experimenting with new bat house designs.
Some designs that I have tried and did not work are using canvas wrapped around 1" dowels in bat houses . Older farmers told me bats used to almost always be in the canvas oat binder and combine aprons.also bats seem to like canvas umbrellas on patio umbrelles. I had 3 dowels in a larger bat house wrapped loosely with 20 wraps of canvas. Left the house up 4 years was never used by a bat.
Another design I was going to try was plastic material road culverts. Idea was to mount culvert horizontally and put baffles in it. Did not try the design because of the large amount of out gassing of the plastic material.
I don't want to make this post to long so will post again when doing my reports for this year. Will be changing some designs that are not having very good success.
I am working a a totally new design for 1,000 bats or more bat house that will be easy to build and install . The cost to build should be very reasonable. This design is different than any currently available now. It is a design that I think should be a successful bat house. If it works for 1,000 bats can easily be increased in size for many thoussands of bats.
One other item I am going to be checking and being curious about is the hum of energized electrical power lines and if they effect bat house use.
I have Pettersson D200 ulta-sound detector. Heterodyne conversion and digital display. With the digital display you get very accurate tuned frequency.
Anyway under energized power lines I get 22kHz frequencies as far as 75 feet from the power lines. I wonder if this can cause discomfort to the bats ears or their ultra - sonic orientation especially when feeding.
don't know about the bats, but I know that *I* get very nervous near them :thumbdown: , I can hear the humming (I hear high frequencies well), I feel "oppressed", is perhaps the best description. There is a Bonneville Power line running through the local turkey habitat, and I notice that the turkeys won't fly under the lines, will detour half a mile out of their way to fly over the lines where the lines climb a ridge (sagging closer to the ground), or will make a u-turn when approaching them.
Stands to reason that bats, who use their ears even more than turkeys do, would be affected.
