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kh67
Member
| Joined: | Thu May 22nd, 2008 |
| Location: | Indianola, Iowa |
| Posts: | 10 |
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Posted: Tue May 27th, 2008 11:01 pm |
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It was a very busy bat house-building holiday weekend for us. We used IowaNate's layout for the 3 economy nursery houses from one 4x8 sheet of plywood and modified it to make 2 slightly larger houses (2 inches larger in each direction). Since we do have a lot of trees, I opted to paint it black to absorb the sun that it does get. We used the pivot pole with a 4x4 wooden post. I'm really quite happy with how it turned out. The green thing at the bottom of the post is an old bed sheet so that I can see any evidence of guano.
This view below is to the north and shows the distance to the closest tree in that direction, about 75 or 80 feet. The nearest tree to the south is about 25 or 30 feet away. Its hard to tell from the pictures with all the trees around, but the house has a very open path for access from both north and south. I'm quite hopeful about this one's success. In watching the bats fly around at night, this is right in their flight pattern. As a matter of fact, we had a bat in our other house last night and when he came out he looked like he nearly ran into this house. My husband joked that he was thinking, "Whoa! Where'd that thing come from?!" This is a spot that was previously unavailable due to a tree about 6 feet away. You can see the tree my husband cut down about 2 weeks ago is still laying in the yard, waiting for us to buy a chipper. It had been nearly horizontal (!!) after an ice storm.
The houses are mounted back-to-back, and we went ahead and put some baffles in between to make a couple extra chambers instead of just hollow space. We ended up having to make the center baffles between houses double thick, though, since the spaces would have been too narrow if we tried to make 3 chambers between houses instead of 2, giving a total of 8 chambers.
Seems we had a little brown possibly visit the first night, assuming what I found on the ground below where I spread a bed sheet was actually guano. I do know that its not a bug.  I tried to look up into the house and see if anyone was still there, but its too cloudy to see anything, and I don't want to risk scaring anyone away with a flashlight. In retrospect, I don't think we've ever had little browns before, as the guano I had seen last year was a bit bigger than this. Funny, as I had always thought we had little browns but was apparently wrong.
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IowaNate
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Posted: Tue May 27th, 2008 11:25 pm |
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| The setup looks great! Keep us posted on the guano sheet below it, and if you see bats inside. Hopefully more bats will move into the cluster of houses!
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Terry Lobdell
Member
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Posted: Wed May 28th, 2008 02:11 am |
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| Nice pictures! It should just a matter of time before you have a maternity colony in there!
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IowaNate
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Posted: Thu May 29th, 2008 12:55 am |
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How high are the houses? (my estimate using the photos are 11 to 13 feet). And given that they are in a nightly flight path of the bats the chances of success are greatly increased.
The guano on the maple seed is definately little brown bat sized, not to dampen hopes, but from the photo it looks smoother than bat guano and looks more like mouse excrement. It may very well be from a bat though, just check for shiny insect parts and an irregular surface on the piece of "poop". Bat guano will generally crumble easily when rolled between fingers whereas mouse excrement will be firm and not break up easily.
Can't wait to see how your houses do!
Nate
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kh67
Member
| Joined: | Thu May 22nd, 2008 |
| Location: | Indianola, Iowa |
| Posts: | 10 |
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 08:06 am |
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I agree that the original picture I had posted was probably not guano and was either a seed of some sort or, like you said, mouse droppings. I hadn't seen any more poo from any sort of creature over the next several days, but I went out and checked again yesterday afternoon and there is an undeniably (to me) bug-part-filled sample under the new house. Sadly, the house was empty. As gross as it is to be posting pictures like this, is this guano?
I haven't measured the height of the newest nursery house, but by best estimate it is about 12 feet to the bottom of the house. The 4x4 it is mounted on is 10', and the 4x4 sticking out of the ground it is hinged on is 6' with 3' in the ground. My husband had tried to make it so that the center of the house would have an opening exactly the same size as the post and would just fit over it, but the opening ended up too tight and the house wouldn't slide all of the way down. I'm guessing it is about a foot or so down on the 4x4.
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Terry Lobdell
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 01:26 pm |
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| That is definitely guano! Looks like little brown.......
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