bats are our freind and highly beneficial for insect control

Did you know? Bats make up a quarter of all mammal species on the earth. Due to “bat lore” and because they are only active at night, bats have become the victims of some pretty tall tales.

They are not blind or dirty, nor do they get caught in ladies’ hair. Also, much like other mammals, less than half of 1 percent of all bats contracts rabies.

Seventy percent of bats consume insects, sharing a large part of natural pest control. There are also fruit-eating bats; nectar-eating bats; carnivorous bats that prey on small animals, frogs, lizards, birds, fish-eating bats; and probably most famously, the blood-sucking vampire bats, native to South America.

Bats are also valuable in medical research, contributing to the development of navigational aids for the blind. Not only are bats highly beneficial for insect control, they pollinate fruit flowers, disperse seeds in tropical rainforests and are an important source for fertilizer.

A single little brown bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes in a single hour, and is one of the world’s longest-lived mammals for its size, with a life span of almost 40 years. While some bat populations number in the millions, others are dangerously low or are in decline.

Bats can be found almost anywhere in the world, except the polar regions and extreme deserts. Bats find shelter in caves, crevices, tree cavities and buildings. Some species are solitary, while others form colonies of more than a million individuals.

Some bats have evolved a highly sophisticated sense of hearing. They emit sounds that bounce off of objects in their path, sending echoes back to the bats. From the echoes, the bats can then determine the size of the objects, how far away they are, how fast they are traveling and even their texture … all in a split second.

A baby bat is called a pup. The gestation period for bats is from 40 days to six months and the larger bats have longer gestation periods, with the litter size normally being only one pup.

At birth, a pup weighs up to 25 percent of its mother’s body weight, which is like a human mother giving birth to a 31-pound baby.

Ouch! The babies are cared for in maternity colonies, where the females congregate to bear and raise the young. The father bats don’t help raise the pups.

When our oldest son was a little boy, he brought a bat in to the Bulletin to show Jim a bat he had caught. It kind of cleared the place of all our lady customers.

Well, that’s about the end of my limited bat knowledge … they really aren’t all that bad, but I still don’t think I could strike up a relationship with one. source