The Avalon Organic Gardens, Farm, and Ranch Report

Our interest in bats began in the summer of 2009 while looking for natural ways to keep our insect pest population down.  We read online that bats are the primary predators of night-flying insects and that they can eat over half of their body-weight each night.  The following is and excerpt from The Bat House Builder’s Handbook: “Just one little brown myotis [bat] can catch a thousand or more mosquito-sized insects in a hour and a colony of 150 big brown bats can catch enough cucumber beetles each summer to prevent egg laying that otherwise could infest local gardens with 33 million rootworms.  Cucumber and June beetles, stinkbugs, leafhoppers, and cutworm and corn earworm moths—all well-know pests—are just a few of the many insects consumed by these frequent users of bat houses.  In addition, many pests flee areas where they hear bat echolocation sounds.”

Needless to say, we immediately wanted to have these little guys as our allies.  We started researching how we could attract them to Avalon Gardens and roll out the red carpet to the feast of pests that were in our pastures.  The bats’ ears must have been burning because they arrived very soon after those first days of research.  Every night, huge colonies of bats could be seen hunting the desert skies above our land.  We were overjoyed to have them, but were a little disappointed when we found out that they had chosen our barns and the eves of our houses as places to roost.  As beautiful as bats are they make a mess!

We became very interested in setting up bat houses, artificial bat habitats, to encourage our fuzzy friends to relocate.  After many emails back and forth about receiving state funding and grant proposals, we were blessed with a private, anonymous donor who made the whole thing happen when they set us up with 9 bat houses to place throughout Avalon Organic Gardens, Farm, & Ranch.

We put the first two bat houses up in an old mesquite tree just to the west of our Northern garden beds.  Soon we will put the others up in different locations around the property to give the bats a choice of where to roost.  We’ll keep you posted on their progress throughout the months of Spring as we head toward Summer, the most popular time of year for bats in our area. 

Bat Conservation International has created an excellent website with tons of information about bats and bat conservation.  For more information, visit www.batcon.org/.  If you would like to help us here in our efforts to establish habitats for bats, please consider a donation to Avalon Organic Gardens, Farm, & Ranch.  We are hoping to humanely exclude the bats from the barn this Spring and you may be able to help cover the cost of supplies for this project.