Bats! I saw BATS in my back yard last night!!!! Swooping and darting up through the space between our trees...It was AWESOME!
(image courtesy: http://www.rozylowicz.com/retirement/carlsbad/carlsbad-bats.html)
I don't know if you know about the mosquitoes in Green Country, OK. They are absolutely horrendous! I've heard they are worse this year (this is our first year in this area) due to the mega rains we've had. It's already the wettest year on record in July with many more months to come.
So when I saw the bats arrive, I wanted to stand up and do a bat cheer! Welcome home, my flying friends! PLEASE stick around! PLEASE eat several hundred mosquitoes tonight! (Mosquito tartare is delicious, I hear.) PLEASE beat that nasty white-nose syndrome! Yaaaaaay, BATS!
Several years ago I used to drive out to Weatherford, OK to some bat caves my ex- knew about. They were a locals hang-out for college students who wanted to chill (i.e. drink beer) on hot summer nights. We used to go during the day and explore the caves and gather guano. It was stellar in the garden! I hear that the caves have become more protected and that people from OU and OSU are conducting research there.
That's probably the strangest thing I've lost in a break-up...access to guano. Ah, well, what can you do? Maybe the bats will do a gracious fly-over of my garden. That would be nice.
YAAAAAAAAAAAY, BATS!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Holy Toledo, Batwoman!
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8 comments:
OH Lewru---just one more thing for me to be jealous! I absolutely love bats. In fact, I love them so much that when I was teaching full time, I spent 6 weeks in an integrated thematic unit about bats that always ended with a field trip to Alabaster Caverns. I even had a "bat cave" in my classroom.
DH and I were just looking online at a bat watch in OK and were saddended to find that we missed it. So sad, that we almost planned a quick trip to Carlsbad Caverns before school starts to make up for missing it. We decided that you cannot call a 1200 mile round trip a short one, so we are staying home....maybe next year.
Bat boxes, along with wren and martin houses, are on my to-do and wish list for my yard. We have owls that leave us pellet presents occasionally, and we are grateful for their part in the culture of our yard, but they just aren't bats. :)
Don't be too jealous just yet...this is only the first time I've seen them and when I did some reading today it made me wonder where they've come from. There is no close source of water that I know of and one thing I read said it needs to be in a 1/4 mile radius. So maybe it was a fluke. Either way they really cleaned up some of my insects and rallied my spirits!
Yay for bats. We look forward every year for our bats. The kids and I go out almost every night and watch for them to come swooping down by our heads. They live in our neighbors garage and she is totally cool with it. We were considering putting up a bat house to see if we could get some more to hang out at our place. I hope they stick around for you. =)
We loved our bats in Denver. They lived on our front porch and we had NO mosquitos. Of course, I don't think there were mosquitoes anywhere in Denver :). We put up a bat house here in OKC but so far no luck! Crossing my fingers...
I read that you need at least two bat houses and preferably three. They said to lower them or raise them if no bats have nested in a year or two. It was interesting reading!
One of DH's degrees is in wildlife biology, so he is my "go-to" guy for animal behavior. I will have to visit with him about how we are going to attract some to our yard. We were just discussing that we would have to place the purple martin house in the front yard, because the backyard had too many trees. I guess the little darlings prefer OPEN spaces.
Other than a tank pond or water pit, I am not certain we have a body of water within the 1/4 mile radius.
We have a ton of barn swallows around here, that (at one time)I thought were bats. I was a bit diappointed, but I love the swallows also...they are so graceful. We used to intentionally make mud for them to build there nests.
I didn't do a whole bunch of research and it seems odd that they would need 3 acres of water within 1/4 mile radius...but that's what I read! Maybe a stream or creek would do just fine?
How lucky you are. I would love to see some bats around here. I have actually purchased bat poo. It is great in the garden.
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