Subject: Re: Bat Houses?

From: [email-masked] (Karen Paulsell)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 03:52:59 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Millerandy) writes:
>Hi - I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I am interested in building
>a bat house in my garden.   Anybody have any ideas about building them? 

One of my friends here in the East Bay, a real bat-fan, said she was
considering a bat house, but most of the articles she read always talked
about how many mosquitos bats could eat...and we hardly have any of
them: when the weather's hot enough, there's almost no standing water
for the larva. (I am not complaining, mind you!) So she thought
there weren't enough bugs around for bats here?

Seems to me, though, that even without skeeters, there's plenty
of bugs in the world, even in this part of it?

Though I admit, in spite of my night-time slug-hunting by flashlight,
which often blends into star-gazing, moon-gazing, jet-watching, and
police-helicopter surveillance, I've never seen a bat in Oakland, or
in SF where I used to live.  I once-in-while saw them when I lived in
Kansas City, but never in the Bay Area. It's quite a kick, flitting
zigzags of action, silhouetted against the stars and sky. Flit-flit-
flit, did I see it? Did I not?

I did see the recent article in the SF Chronicle that featured bats,
and the Napa/Sonoma wineries that encouraged bats. One winery
was quite proud to house a colony of a rare and endangered species.
I thought having some of those really pale-colored ones would make
it easier to spot them at night. Come on, they gotta be almost as
much fun as having goldfish, you can't pet either of them!