Bats

[BearBio]

Almost 20 years ago, I started in Federal service as a wildlife biologist and one of my first duties was to coordinate with Caltrans throughout the southern Central valley of California. A lot of the work was on freeway overpasses (I-5 and Hwy 99, etc). Arid land bats use overpasses as roosts (the smell of urine is often bats and not homeless people). Anyway, I asked my Dr at Kaiser HMO about rabies shots. He agreed it would be a good idea to get immunized (prophylactic shots). That day, I got my first rabies, annual flu and annual pneumonia shots. The pneumonia was the one that killed me for two days.

A few "little known" facts about bats:
1. Bats carry rabies but rarely die from it.
2. Bats are one of our most prolific pollinators.
3. The bats in Carlsbad Caverns eat millions of insects nightly!
4. Same for the bats under the bridges in San Antonio.
5. Florida reduced mosquito problems by requiring bat habitat near waterways during community planning.

Update: Just got a pneumonia booster and my left arm is like a 2x4, 4 feet long!

 

[nachogrande]

KILL TONS OF MOSQUITOES & POOP GOLD.

Bat guano is an old & BIG MONEY industry. If all the animals that have carried & spread rabies were gone, there would be no animals left. A very simple to build bat house (app 18"x 24"x 2" will house MANY & put ANY bug zapper to shame. If it aint bats, it's bears. Better stay indoors at all times. Holy bat poop, batman.

 

[bearfoot]

when I lived in SC, used to watch the bats soaring/ darting doing their bug clean up.

 

[BearBio]

Good work for volunteering. Wife and I used to but the current administration has done away with "credit hours" or "comp time" for Educational Outreach. We still do it on our own time! We'll continue next year when I retire. Wife got me a bat house to hang up for Father's Day=not yet!

Hung 6 bee houses yesterday! Making 4 or 5 more this weekend to hang.

I make and donate bee houses. I've made about 60 this year. We had a garage sale and I donated as many as they could sell to an Alzheimer's group for their bake sale (Double benefit!). The local National Fish Hatchery has placed about a dozen and I have another 2 dozen for them, as well as a display. Same for a local watershed group who will place them (they already have done a dozen) through an after-school environmental program for school kids.

KUDOs to everyone who helps out! Thank you for your efforts.

The Conservative Liberal or, am I, a Liberal Conservative?

 

[Watchdog]

That whole thing about bats getting tangled in ladies' hair is such malarkey. Their sonar is too good.

When we were kids, we'd throw small pieces of gravel up in the air when the bats were flying around the streetlights. The bats' sonar would pick it up and they'd follow the falling gravel almost to the ground.

As others have noted, the bats aren't as plentiful as in years past. They're still here, just not as numerous. It's still a treat for me to see them flying at dusk.

 

[BearBio]

When we were kids, we'd throw small pieces of gravel up in the air when the bats were flying around the streetlights. The bats' sonar would pick it up and they'd follow the falling gravel almost to the ground.

Way back when I was in the Army (1971-72), a buddy and I hitch-hiked from Ft Ord in Monterey to Ft Lewis in WA to get his car. We were stuck in Laytonville, CA for hours. There was only one streetlight and we amused ourselves by throwing gravel for the bats!

 

[mtgianni]

Many caves are trying to stop the spread of white nose fungus and limit it to the eastern states. It has not yet made as large an impact in the western states.
Bats do die naturally and like any animal can pick odd places.
I find them funner to watch than the Blue Angels with night time aerobatics. It is estimated a bat eats it weight in flying insects nightly. Blue birds, martins and swallows do the same during the day. I still get bit.

 

[BearBio]

"If all the animals that have carried & spread rabies were gone, there would be no animals left."

Likely true if you mean "Mammals" and not animals.......the biomass (total WEIGHT of a species in a given area) is often used to measure productivity. In earthly biomass, termites outweigh all other animals combined!

More rodent species than any other mammal (bats are #2). More beetles (810,000 species) than any other. "AN INORDINATE fondness for beetles." That was the reply of J.B.S. Haldane, a British scientific polymath of the early 20th century, when he was asked if there were anything that could be concluded about God from the study of natural history. !

 

[Fishslayer]

 

[hittman77]

Man oh man I really dislike bats!
I'm sure the good Lord has a reason for them but that's just lost on me.

My wife called one evening a few months ago. I was almost 200 miles away visiting our son. She told me there was a bat in the living room she was trying to chase out of the house and now can't find him. She wanted to know what the next course of action was.

I told her to sell the house; I'd send a moving crew for the gun safe another day.

 

[kwselke]

Oh that kind of bats! I thought this was going to be about bats:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9SQAs8mAgY[/ame]

 

[500SNW]

People talk a lot about Bats carrying Rabies. There's another way they can get you - Histoplasma capsulatum. It is a fungus that grows on Bat droppings and can infect people. It is fairly common east of the Mississippi and has a tendency to affect cavers, farmers and others who work in the dirt. I've got ocular histoplasmosis ....which probably explains why I can't shoot worth **** these days.

 

[nachogrande]

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, (NOT)!

Skeeters, fire ants, fleas, ticks, no-see-ums, gnat's, sea/body/head lice, etc. etc. I'll take bats ALL DAY vs any of these.

 

[Abbynormal]

A buddy of mine has a 150+ year old house that he restored. There were 3 ponds on his 10 acre property and he bought an old Cat bulldozer and dredged and dozed the ponds into 2 deep ponds with an island. The mosquitoes were unreal. You couldn't go outside without suffering many bites.

I have a close friend that is an Entomologist and she sent me plans for bat houses. I bought a dozen rough cut oak planks, some dowels and a dozen pressure treated 12' 4x4"s.

Spent a weekend augering and setting the 12 posts around the 2 ponds, another weekend cutting and mitering the rough sawn oak planks into bat houses and the next weekend assembling and mounting the bat houses.

With in 2 weeks of having the bat houses up and running, my friend had a cookout/BBQ/beer fest/thank everybody party.

NOT 1 MOSQUITO BITE!

 

[BearBio]

The two deep ponds with an island is also a good design for duck nesting habitat!

 

[HorizontalMike]

Histoplasmosis

People talk a lot about Bats carrying Rabies. There's another way they can get you - Histoplasma capsulatum. It is a fungus that grows on Bat droppings and can infect people. It is fairly common east of the Mississippi and has a tendency to affect cavers, farmers and others who work in the dirt. I've got ocular histoplasmosis ....which probably explains why I can't shoot worth **** these days.

You betcha! Not any fun having Histoplasmosis. I caught it when I was 6yr old and missed 5-1/2 months of school because of it. Back in 1959 there were only 5 doctors that knew anything about this disease, and luckily one of them was less than 100 miles away.

I remember being in the Indianapolis Children's Hospital and being isolated from everyone. My parents were only allowed at the door to my room and even then they had to wear masks. That was one lonely whole month of December. Geez, I can still remember the spinal tap and warning...
"DON"T MOVE!"

Funny how much I still remember 60yr later... Anyway, we figured I picked it up playing in a local barn about a block away from where we lived at the time (Midwest).

 

[500SNW]

HorizontalMike Sorry to hear that horror story. AFAIK I just have ocular histoplasmosis in my left eye. Never got sick from it earlier in life...at least that I remember. Not sure how I got it, but most likely its because I used to volunteer on paleontology and archaeology digs where I would wash buckets full of dirt through a fine mesh screen.

 

[sureshotbob]

I use to see bats by my house every night but have not noticed any lately .
A buddy of mine made a bunch of bat houses and gave me one . I put it up in one of the large oak trees in my yard . My buddy told me it had to be at least 17 ' from the ground so they can drop out without hitting the ground.

 

[Grip_Maker's_Wife]

That whole thing about bats getting tangled in ladies' hair is such malarkey. Their sonar is too good.

Getting tangled in hair is malarkey (someone has been watching too many movies) but I was hit in the head by a bat, three times in fact, on consecutive evenings on the same path in a campground. Perhaps it was a mama protecting her young, or it was sick, I don't know. It was strange though, and it was only me despite being with 4 other people.

 

[mtgianni]

My wife loves caves and has worked as a guide at two. She had just finished telling people on her tour how harmless and beneficial bats were when she screamed and started slapping the air. She turned around from the group and had a bat fly into her face. We sometimes forget that even animals have poor navigators in their midst.