Bat House Magazine

                 Bats are very helpful, kind, and they are getting killed by a terrible, deadly disease called the White Nosed Syndrome.  Many people just think that bats are little pesky things that are just so annoying and disgusting, but you are very very wrong.

                  Maybe more amazing facts about bats would change your mind about them.  Bats can live almost anywhere except for isolated areas.  Also, bats are the only flying mammal because flying squirrels don’t actually fly they glide, and the sugar glider also glides, but bats fly. Every night, a bat goes out for dinner and eats more than 1,000 insects!

                   There are also other ways that people have reasons to not like bats. They believe in many myths.  A big one that people believe in is when bats come and get tangled up into people’s hair. This is not true, they are usually just detecting a bug around your head if it would ever happen to you. Also, people think that all bats bite and carry rabies and diseases.  This is also not true, because bats may get a disease, such as the White Nosed Syndrome, but that doesn’t mean that every single bat that you see, has those things.  The last myth that a lot of people know of, is that all  bats drink blood, this only really occurs to vampire bats, which blood is their food source and they pretty much always get the blood from cows and animals like that.

                    When people say that bats are pesky little things hiding in cracks of their houses, well no, bats are actually very helpful to humans.  Bats eat mosquitoes and bugs so people don’t get annoyed by so many bugs and insects all of the time, and they don’t have as many mosquitoes pester people and their skin.

                       Lots of humans think that bats will just keep coming because there are no dangers to them.  This is very well false because diseases can kill bats just like White Nosed Syndrome, and they are also being killed by wind turbines.  WNS is killing lots of bats’ wing skin, so they are not able to fly, which then this wakes them up in the middle of winter, and then they grow fungus from being so cold. When all of this happens, it is during the middle of winter so the mammals cannot find food, like fruit or insects, so soon enough they will starve to death.  Wind turbines are also a big threat to bats. Bats are being killed by the blades from a wind turbine and are slowly decreasing bat population.

                        One way that people can help to protect these animals is by building bat houses outside in your backyard, or by putting them in your local park.  These bat houses will really help the bats because the bats that will live in the house, will be less likely to get the disease of WNS, because they won’t be all shoved up in a cave that will have bats with the disease, and then that would just spread to the rest of the colony. Another way that we can save bats from wind turbines is by putting sounds that the bats will hear onto the blades or in the middle of them, to chase or keep the bats away from the blades.

                          According to all of this information, it is really helpful to save our bats from diseases and wind turbines and make sure to go out, and make some bat houses!