Bat Population Threatened by White Nose Syndrome

This really bites!

Bats are truly great to have around, and they do quite a number on the local insect population. We don't have caves by me, so we don't have excessive bats, but we do have our share, and I have been known to put up bat houses from time to time. If you go out at night in the summer, you see them quite often swooping around the trees and bushes catching supper. Never had a problem with them, nor a truly negative experience, but they do make a mess in the barns where they sleep the day away.

Perhaps if this does not get figured out soon, we can boost the Barn Swallow population in response? As a youngster, I was always told that those guys eat 2 to 3,000 mosquitoes per day per nestling when they have chicks in the nest and 5 to 6K per day for the adults to keep flying around catching all those blood-suckers. That amounts to a lot of insects over the summer, considering here in the Midwest they have 3 broods per year before they head south for the winter. The best part is they always come back to the same spot every year, and you can learn to move anything you don't want covered in recycled exoskeletons over a foot or so and then just sweep up the pile every week or two. It is kind of a hassle, but nothing compared to having millions more mosquitoes.

We have both bats and swallows, and with those two guys combing the skies day and night, we have very few insects. I live literally IN the woods, and there is ample water all around me. Rarely am I ever driven inside due to excessive mosquitoes. Occasionally when the conditions are perfect for a hatch, it will happen, but within a day or two, the flying predators will have them pretty well cleaned up!

I hope the bat doctors come up with a solution pretty soon, as there is plenty of room in the bug-eating kingdom for both of these great to have around friends. The more of the animals like this we can employ the less damage we have to do to the environment with chemicals!

I am far from a tree-hugger, but I do much prefer the "natural" solutions to the worlds problems over the man-made solutions. I also love trees very much - I just hate granola eating whale protecting tree huggers who think their new-found "green" ways trump historical common sense of working with nature vs. fighting progress, hunting, and animal husbandry at every turn. Our fore-fathers had this all figured out, some of us just forgot most of those lessons we learned as kids the second they sent us to college and we met our first hippie! We first have the responsibility to take care of animals like the cute little guys above, but we also have the right to employ them for our well being - eating undesirable pests.