• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Bats

Phil

Phil

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Bats

Every Wednesday we have social tea up at our Clubhouse, the last Wednesday of the month a guest speaker is invited.

This week it was a talk on bats, the various specie found in Sothern Africa.

It is a Powerpoint slide show and the photos are close up in detail showing the ears, eyes, nose, arms, fingers and feet.
How they breed and carry their pups.

The differences between the insect catching bat and the fruit eating bat.

They are the largest group of mammals on earth.

They feed not only on insects but also fish & frogs. What they eat is digested and passed through in about 30 minutes.

The largest colony in the world can be found in the Bracken Cave, Texas, where it is estimated 20 million bats live. They arrive in March/April from Mexico and give birth to their pups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracken_Cave

bracken-bat-cave-22.jpg

There are a lot of information sources on the internet (I am not going to bore you)

At our old house we had a bat colony that roosted in the garage roof, entrance was on top of the North gable.


{Edit - add pic}
 
Bet that was interesting. I saw a few on our evening safari's earlier this year in SA.

We love the bats, always have them in our garden in Warrington in spring/summer at sundown, and we have put a bat box up at the end of the workshop, which has a guest in based on the guano on the gravel below it. :eusa-dance:

Going to stick a few more boxes up around the property to give our little friends a few more options too.
:obscene-drinkingcheers:
 
Brilliant. We have bats too, but fewer than when we first moved in I think.

Once did a trip to a bat cave in Peru and we had to wait in the cave entrance until near dusk when the came out in their thousands. Awe inspiring.
 
I love bats, although having a dead one float into my face when I was wading in a tunnel in NW Western Australia a few years ago wasn't an experience I'd like to repeat. It had a wingspan of about 3 feet.

I've got a couple of bats holding up one of my projects at the moment. We won't be able to even apply for planning permission until next May because of some bats in the roof.

Oh, and the bats of Kasanka, in Zambia!! There are so many in some trees that the branches break. It's the biggest migration on earth. Quite an amazing sight (and sound).
 
Have any of you chaps built bat boxes?
Thought I would have a go, any recommendations about design?
 
Lurker":4x9hc021 said:
Have any of you chaps built bat boxes?
Thought I would have a go, any recommendations about design?
Click to expand...

Loads of them on Google/YouTube. There's a couple of design features you need to take into account, opening size, opening location and a 'ladder' inside for them to grip onto.

Mine is this very basic style...

bat-box-on-a-tree-400x300.jpg


This is a good basic one but doesn't have the saw cuts to create the 'ladder'

https://www.nwt.org.uk/actions/how-buil ... SlEALw_wcB

Another one here with a video

https://www.lifegrecabat.eu/en/news-articles/349
 
I made a few of these with my kids out of old kitchen drawer fronts. They are used as summer daytime roots. We also get them behind our south facing shutters in the summer as we never bother to close them.

file.php
 
Mike G":3clmyn82 said:
Oh, and the bats of Kasanka, in Zambia!! There are so many in some trees that the branches break. It's the biggest migration on earth. Quite an amazing sight (and sound).
Click to expand...

These are the ones we get. About 120mm long.

Bat.jpg

I get to remove/rescue them from most of our neighbours’ properties. Very gently in a large towel – incredibly fragile creatures. But scary to old people.

And as MikeG (and others) might remember I was brought up in Zambia. Fruit bats were a real nuisance in the trees in our compound. The garden boy hated them. Not sure a catapult or poison were not employed. .
 
Almost certainly pipistrelles. These are ours.

58F5BCFE-4FEE-4247-8999-DFB5BDF9035C.jpeg

0EAB2824-9146-4D13-9400-7CD217AE2674.jpeg

They are on the house wall behind the open shutters which I had moved briefly for the photos.
 
Cheers Mark,

I knew that there were loads on the internet, but needed a U.K. version for U.K. bats.
I will try the NWT one, as soon as I can find an adult to help me.
 
You may find that small birds colonise bat boxes as well. I'm pretty sure that wrens, which are tiny, colonised a couple of our bat boxes last summer.
 
When living in rural NSW, Australia, we had a large back yard with a huge mulberry tree. For about a week in late summer, it would be the home of flying foxes (fruit bats) who would clear the upper half of the tree of ripe fruit. Shining a torch into the tree at night you would see lots of pairs of red eyes staring back. Used to make a bit of a mess of the patio and any washing left outside overnight.
 
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