Left: Brown/Common Long eared bats emerging from the small bat houses (spring 2006)
Right: small bat house - and I
I know the ideas about bat houses are very different in Europe and North-America. In Europe we have done a lot with mounting small bat houses on trees in forest areas. In the US and Canada you have done a lot with bigger multi-layered bat houses mounted on buildings and on poles in urban and rural areas (and also forest areas). But I am convinced that these different ideas mix very well. I have experienced the success of implementing big nursery houses in Europe (see my post on the Dutch Bat House) and I am sure that somehow the European small bat houses will find some use in the US as well.
In a forest nearby Tilburg I have mounted about 50 small bat houses. 25 are single chambered flat pannel bat houses and the other 25 are wide chambered bat houses. They have not attracted a nursery colony yet and they might be too small for that. That is also not the purpose of these bat houses. There are plenty of hollow trees and woodpecker holes for them to roost in.
The purpose of these bat houses is to make some bat species more visible. We have about 20 bat species in the Netherlands. But almost 50% of these species are very hard to recognise with a bat detector (also with Sound analyses). Most of those "difficult species" are from the genus Myotis or Plecotus. As netting bats (with mist nets) is prohibited unless you have a special permit it is very difficult to get information about the whereabouts of these bat species. To make these bat visible our work group has mounted 400 bat houses (8 areas with 50 bat houses) in different forest areas where Myotis and Plecotus species could be present. If colonies of these species would be present in these forest we would be able to find bachelors or small groups or even nursery roosts of bats in our bat houses
The program is now running for almost 5 years. In a few areas we have been successful. We haven't revealed any Myotis species yet  but we have revealed that Brown (or Common) Long Eared Bats (Plecotus auritus) are far more common than detector surveys can show. These bats are very silent hunters and in my area in detector surveys I would encounter maybe one longer eared bat in a year. Just 1 year after mounting the bats we already counted more than 20 long eared bats in our bat houses.
I will show more examples of bats in these small bat house in this forum (with statistics), but in this post I start with a picture and video of common/brown long eared bats roosting and emerging from a bat house.
Brown/Common Long eared bats in one of the small bat houses (spring 2007)
Erik
P.S. and yes indeed, this is my Avatar species! When they are torpid they fold their large ears under their arms. It is almost a metamorphosis, they look very different with folder or unfolded ears!
Last edited on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 10:02 am by Erik
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