this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 267 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Bats eat their weight in mosquitoes every night, unlike your typical hoa board member

[–] Sonotsugipaa 103 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This isn't funny, think of all the poor HOA board members that get eaten by bats every night

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stop, stop. I can only get so erect.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What if the bats bite humans, create vampires and you have hot single vampire mommies in your area?

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago

Yes, but enough about the HOA!

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I thought bats were nocturnal

[–] [email protected] 109 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

And so, Lunar Punk was born.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

So, after you build this Bat Roost, how do you tell the local bat population that you're open for business .. asking for .. a friend, purely for .. educational purposes.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Bats are incredibly picky about their roosts. People have done this and attracted 0 bats lol.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

And other people just have a million bats living in their attic

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It helps if you actually live near bats.

I came home to a small ball of fluff and wings wrapped up in the corner of my porch one day, so for gits and shiggles I put up a small bat box on a post against the trees nearby.

It took a week or two but I noticed it was in use when I went outside one night and saw one pop out of it.

Protip: be very careful about what you use to stain/paint it. Apparently they don't like the smell of those things. I didn't paint mine.

Bats need a real estate agent...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

It helps if you actually live near bats

So you SHOULDN'T expect thousands of bats to travel thousands of miles for your roost? Good to know!

crosses "build bat roost by Greenland vacation house" from to-do list

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A friend of mine loves being in his backyard but hates the mosquitoes. He heard about this bat roost thing and installed one about 5 years ago. It has not attracted a single bat.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

It's important to build the right kind of roost.

Check https://www.batcon.org/ for guidance and inspiration

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

I guess like any other animals, bats will seek places with other bats, or where bats lived before. The best option would be to procure a pair of domesticated bats and put them into the roost, I'm not sure if it's even legal. The next best choice is to acquire a few kilograms of bat shit, and spray it all over and inside your roost, so it smells like bat.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

If you build it, they will come.

We've built a little urban utopia for our pollinator friends. The little guys just started popping up when the flowers started blooming.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would consider this a service to the neighborhood. More bats, fewer mosquitoes.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago

But they're black so HOAs hate them.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago

In my village in the Netherlands bat roosts are installed in a bunch of places, they also mandate that houses have little box things on their side for them. Never seen a single bat lmao, but in the old family house in France there's a bunch in the attic.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's important to build the right kind of roost for the bats in your area

Check https://www.batcon.org/ for guidance and inspiration

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

This is very true. Artificial refugia can act as animal traps by encouraging predators to exploit them, or by promoting desired animal use, but exposing them to thermal extremes.

https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/csp2.204

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Poked through the site a bit and found the direct link to the Bat House Builder's Handbook for anyone else interested!

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

I love my local bats! It's fun watching them under the street lights at night.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nobody complains about bats, bats are awesome and hard to notice anyway

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

that last bit tells me you're either old or have hearing damage: we have some bats around me and despite never once seeing them it's plainly obvious to me that they exist thanks to their shrill squeaky calls in the twilight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4eqkaHkTAI

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Linking to a guy using an expensive ultrasonic mic to hear bats doesn't really support youe statement that you're hearing bats around you despite never seeing them. Maybe you have hearing damage?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I live in an HOA (obligatory Fuck them)

They put up numerous bat boxes on poles around the common wooded area and a large retention pond right about the time Covid started.

Main reason is it’s free insect killers. We have tons of pests anyway being so close to a wooded area and a lake + the retention pond we have and the added bats help to clear some of them out.

As for the noise, no you really don’t hear them here. All the frogs are the loudest things heard of a night.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Some species of bats spend more time in the upper ranges that no human can hear than others.

The spotted bat for instance, is found on west coast if North America and mostly calls at 11khz well within even older human hearing while other bats operate entirely outside human hearing.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That thing's bigger than my house!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You have a house?!?! Must be nice.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Tfw the bats can afford higher rent than you can

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's really sad and unfair that bats are a common vector for rabies because they're so cute and sweet and important to the ecosystem

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