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Terry Lobdell
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Posted: Sat Mar 22nd, 2008 12:36 am |
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Sat Mar 22nd, 2008 12:39 am |
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This house had a little brown maternity colony in 2007. I got exit counts of 25 before pups and 38 after pups were flying.
It has 4 crevices with mesh baffles. The exterior is covered with aluminum painted flat black. It is vented in the front and with holes drilled in the sides.
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Sat Mar 22nd, 2008 12:42 am |
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Sat Mar 22nd, 2008 12:45 am |
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This view is looking towards a nice sized trout stream about 200 yards back in the woods. I think that is the reason I have bats roosting in this house.
I've watched bats swarming this house in the evening with the security light on.......the light did not seem to bother them at all.........
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Sat Mar 22nd, 2008 12:48 am |
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Sat Mar 22nd, 2008 12:53 am |
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This is a farm house where I excluded a few big browns in 2004 after mounting this bat house........I was suprised when the bat house was used only by little browns.
Many years ago the house had a slate roof. I was told my Great Uncle counted 200 little browns (I'm guessing they were little browns) exit one evening in the 1950's. The little browns left when the slate roof was replaced by asphalt shingles years later.
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IowaNate
Member
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Posted: Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 04:22 pm |
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Great location Terry! I too have two houses at the Nature Center located on poles with lights and my colonies have done extremely well. And many of us have seen bats feeding around street lights at night. So I don't think that bats are affected by lights mounted above the house nearly as much as first thought, as long as the house itself does not allow light inside.
Perhaps more houses will be mounted in this fashion to see if lights truly affect bats. And those people that have a light pole mounted in their yards that were previously apprehensive about putting a bat house on it, can go ahead and mount one if there are no other options.
I will do further testing on my own at the Nature Center on a lone light pole that illuminates the parking lot. It gets adequate sunlight, is within 200 yards of the creek, and I can get a house mounted at least 16 feet up, but I definitely have to mount it early Spring since the shallow ditch that the pole is in gets heavy weed cover (4 to 5 feet high by about May). This house will be mounted within 100 yards of my current houses as well. This will be my fourth 300+ bat capacity house within a 100 yard radius of all the others, and I would love to see the colony expand up to 2000 bats within five years.
Has anyone else got Spring bat house mounting fever?
Nate
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IowaNate
Member
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Posted: Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 09:56 pm |
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Just a theory, but bat houses mounted on poles with lights might only have trouble being successful due to a predator (hawk or owl) perching on the light and catching bats as they leave the house. On the other hand they might be very successful due to the fact that the bats have a veritable buffet of bugs to eat as they congregate by the light. I think that much more research needs to be done before we can honestly say that mounting a bat house on a light pole is a bad idea. Nocturnal does not mean being afraid of light, it just means being more active during the dark. A bat's food source is most active during the night, and those insects are usually attracted to a light source...it would seem to me that most bats would feed where the majority of the insects are. And due to my very limited observations around light poles, I have seen a good number of bats feeding in the the light shed by them.
I hope to test this concept more in the next few years where I can get permission to hang houses on light poles within a few hundreds yards of open water, and I hope a few of you can do the same. My economical design of the three chamber house(http://www.batnic.org/forum/forum3/436.html) might encourage a few more people to try it out without investing very much money or time.
Last edited on Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 09:58 pm by IowaNate
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Mon Mar 24th, 2008 02:59 am |
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| Thanks for the comments Nate. How many bats do you have roosting in all of your bat houses?
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IowaNate
Member
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Posted: Mon Mar 24th, 2008 09:43 pm |
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| Well Terry, as of last year in the four houses which I monitor on a monthly basis the total number of bats was around 410. I have given a few houses to friends and they mounted them as I had advised, but I have never gotten to inspect the houses, but two of my friends said there was substantial quantities of guano below the houses by the second year. Those houses had a (calculated) maximum capacity of about 80 bats each, so between those six houses there could easily be 570 bats. In the past I had three houses hung around my parent's home and they were small one or two chambered houses but each one held a lone bachelor big brown for a few months out of the year. Those houses have long since gone and I am going to mount another medium sized three chamber on a utility pole in one of the former bat house locations (all three of the defunct bat houses were within 75 feet of each other).
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