Halloween is Wednesday night and there will be goblins, witches and other monsters prowling the neighborhoods. Whereas these are all mythical creatures, there is one Halloween favorite that will be here for real. It’s the bat and Lake County has more than 20 species of bats.
Don’t worry, bats won’t suck your blood or get tangled in your hair. According to scientists, bats are one of the most misunderstood mammals and, in fact, perform an important service for mankind.
Because bats are nocturnal, fly and have teeth, many people fear them. What the public doesn’t realize is that bat populations play a huge role in controlling insects. Bats have amazing abilities — they are the only mammals capable of true flight. Their unique ultrasonic sonar system enables them to navigate and to catch insects in flight in complete darkness. Bats were on this planet all the way back to the dinosaur days. Once people get to know bats, fear gives way to admiration.
There are many misconceptions about bats. Many people think they are blind, prefer to feast on the blood of prey (animal and human) and attack people. Actually, they see almost as well as us, eat flower nectar and insects (up to 1,200 mosquitoes in one hour) and want nothing more than to be left alone.
Bats move around at night and spend the daylight hours sleeping. They are good at flying at night because they use sound rather than sight to navigate. According to scientists, this method of navigation is known as echolocation and it’s similar in principle to the sonar that submarines use to navigate the ocean. Bats send pulses of sound through their mouths or noses and these pulses echo back, outlining the objects in the bat’s flight path.
The ears of a bat are large and oddly constructed but they help the bat determine where the echoes are coming from. To search for insects a typical bat sweeps an area with sound, sending out 10 beats per second. When the echoes come back from the prey, such as a fly, the sound pulses increase to more than 25 per second. This gives the bat a better idea of where the fly is moving. As the bat hones in on its prey, it sends out more and more sound blips, as many as 200 per second. They can hone in on the smallest of insects with exceptional accuracy. They are so good at echolocation that they can detect and avoid wires as thin as human hairs.
Most bats have an exceptional homing ability. Studies have shown that bats can find their way home from miles away. A good example occurred a few years ago when a woman who had a weekend home in Clearlake Oaks told me that whenever she would come up for the weekend she would find bats roosting in her attic and even in the living room. One of the bats had an unusual white stripe on its body. A bat expert advised her to trap the bats by placing a plastic bag over the hole in the eaves of the house where the bats entered. The bats would leave the house in the evening to feed and would return at daylight. The bag placed over the entrance hole would trap the bats as they left in the evening. She placed the bag over the hole and in the morning was surprised to see that she had more than a dozen bats in the bag, including the one with the white stripe.
Since the woman didn’t want to harm the bats she took them up a rural gravel road and released them. When she arrived at home she opened the front door and was astonished to see the bats back in her living room, including the one with the white stripe. In other words, the bats had beat her back to her house.
Many vineyard owners now realize just how valuable bats are in keeping insects out of their vineyard. They are now erecting bat houses around their property to attract bats.
Bats do occasionally carry rabies and they should not be handled. If you find a dead bat pick it up with a shovel or other devise and dispose of it where a human won’t find it. Don’t just kill these small creatures as they are an important part of your environment.
