Bat House Forum

[Joe Spencer]

Thanks to all of you this year for your input to the forum and helping others with your invaluable bat house experience. We had unprecedented growth this year with us doubling our registrants from 100 to over 200 users. Just fantastic. Looking forward to 2009 and hope you all have a great upcoming holiday season! Joe..

[IowaNate]

And thank you Joe for keeping this great forum running. Even after finding a few minor changes I find that this new format is very easy to navigate. I tell everyone I know about this forum even if they are just slightly interested in bats and bat houses. For newbies and pros alike, this forum is the best on the web!

Happy bat housing!!!

Nate

[cloudman75]

Thank you for your efforts Joe.
I have enjoyed the site since joining this year. Merry Christmas and Happy New year to you Joe and all. Although it has been in the mid 20s a couple of times at night, I still have one bat smaller than a little brown in my three chamber bat house. When it gets really cold for several nights the bat moves to my attic louver on the west side of my house where it usually stays around 35 F. no mater what due to the heat loss from my ceiling of the house into the attic space. This bat has spent the last three winters here and beginning the 4th. I have not been able to identify it, but it looks like a little brown in color, but smaller.

Frank/cloudman75

[Joe Spencer]

Pleasure Frank. I was first thinking that your bat may be a an Eastern Pipistrelle but these bats are much smaller than little brown bats and range from the middle of the U.S. north/south/east. After you narrow down the species by state, using Wikipedia is quite informative on species also showing pictures and conservation status. Example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pipistrelle

[Erik]

Joe, I agree with IowaNate, this is the best forum about bat houses on the web! Not only in North-America, but Worldwide. But then of course the web is worldwide. To my opinion, it is also the most active and inspiring forum about bats at all. Although I live in Europe, with different species of bats, I have learned a lot of it!

Responding to Frank's question
For the bat research group in my area (South in The Netherlands) I have made an "identification guide to bats in bat houses". It is a powerpoint workshop and leaflet showing the characteristics of different bat species that can be found in bat houses. It shows mainly portraits of bats looking down at you from the bat house, so characteristics you can't see (size of feet for example) are not mentioned.
It takes some training, but we managed to find portrait-characteristics for almost all of our species:

• shape of the snout- some species have very wide snouts - other very narrow (our Pipistrelles and Eptesicus-species have wide snouts that stretch to below the ears, while Myotis-species snouts are more narrow and stay between the ears).
• color of the face / ears and arms. (your little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) has quite dark arms and face compared to the pale arms, face and ears of an eastern pipistrelle (Perimyotis subflavus).
• shape and size of the ears and size/shape/presence of a tragus and antitragus . For example Lasiurus species and Tadarida (free tailed) species have these.
• color of the dorsal fur and ventral fur / contrast between dorsal fur, ventral fur and snout.
• presence of little bumps or pimples on the snout.
• Etcetera.

Of course these things are not always easy to see in a high mounted, narrow chambered bat house. But with binoculars and/or digital camera or camcorder it is possible. I have also made a manual on how to get the hang of taking pictures with a digital camera in a narrow chamber of a bat house, whilst standing on the ground. Auto focus and the cameras flash can go very wrong, but it is easy to learn how to do it right.

Maybe we can start a new topic on this? Of course my workshop contains the wrong species for you guys and I expect to be very good in identifying North American species*, but I can give you some ideas.

Erik

*although I am always curious: when I started to get crazy about bats there was only 1 book in Dutch about bats. So I started to read books from the UK and the USA (e.g. Bats in Question) so I know some things about your bats as well.

[Terry Lobdell]

Erik, I would be very interested in learning how to take better pictures of bats roosting in bat boxes with a digital camera. Each year I am doing more power point presentations on bats and bat houses. Anything to improve my pictures would be great! The tips on identification are helpful too! Thanks!