Boone Battles Bugs By Building Bat Bungalows Stacey Carson (left), Boone Department of Public Works supervisor, displays a bat house while Boone Mayor Loretta Clawson (holding Midget) and Eric Gustaveson, the department’s facilities maintenance superintendent, look on. Photos by Mike Shands The Town of Boone recently erected these bat houses along the New River between the National Guard Armory and the Greenway Trail. Each bat house is divided into three interior sections coated with roosting-friendly material. By Mike Shands Boone is going batty. The town recently installed four bat houses along the New River between Hunting Hills Lane and the Appalachian State University intramural fields. Each house can hold as many as 300 bats, which are one of nature’s ways of controlling mosquitoes and other harmful pests. “They’re so important to us. They devour so many insects,” said Boone Mayor Loretta Clawson. “Every night, a bat eats almost its weight in insects. That would be equal to a person eating 150 pounds of french fries in a day. “These little mammals, from what I’ve been reading and studying about them, just do an incredible job as far as taking care of so many insects.” Bats are the major predators of night-flying insects. They can catch one thousand mosquito-sized insects in an hour, but mosquitoes aren’t the only pests that bats devour. They also consume June beetles, stinkbugs, leafhoppers, cutworm moths, corn earworm moths and other crop pests. “A colony of 150 big brown bats can catch enough cucumber beetles each summer to prevent egg laying that otherwise could infest local gardens with 33 million rootworms (larvae),” said Wendy Patoprsty, an extension agent for natural resources and environmental education. Bats also help disperse seeds and pollinate a wide variety of plants, and there’s yet another way they help the environment. “When you have bats you can cut down tremendously on your pesticides,” Clawson said. “We try to be environmental in the Town of Boone. We believe in doing good things for the environment. It is very important to me that we try to do all that we can naturally to protect our environment.” Eric Gustaveson, facilities maintenance superintendent for the town’s department of public works, said there is a partial wetland area near the river, helped occasionally by beaver activity. “They’ll pond up some areas, and we’ve got a lot of water,” Gustaveson said. “There was just concern about mosquitoes and that kind of thing. This was a way to deal with the bug problem. “Part of the town’s philosophy of integrated pest management includes biological control versus just chemical control on a lot of things like that.” Helping Bats More than half of the 40-plus bat species in North America are in decline or already listed as endangered. “A lot of them are endangered species now because their habitat is being destroyed because as development goes it takes away their homes,” Clawson said. “We need to be sure and protect them, and bat houses have proven to be very effective in doing that.” Clawson said that she has learned a lot about bats in recent weeks. “They don’t compete (for food) with birds because birds are out during the daylight hours, and then the bats come out at night,” she said. “People have gotten the idea that (bats) are bad and that they carry rabies, but what I’ve been reading says that they have rabies no more than any other mammal in the wild. It’s not something that they just have.” Those wanting to attract bats to their yard might want to provide a source of water for them. They should also avoid spraying any kind of chemicals on their yards. “If bats ingest the pesticides and herbicides, they can die from that,” Clawson said. Bat House Specs Gustaveson said that each bat house is about 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 6 inches deep and is divided into three sections of roosting space. They are painted black to absorb more heat and keep them warmer. Town employees installed two poles with two houses apiece on them along the river. The houses are about 16 feet above the ground and face between south and southeast. “If these fill up and there’s a demand, we’ll build some more,” Gustaveson said. He said that the town is also contemplating the prospect of building some duck houses along the river. For more information on bats, bat houses or to order a bat house look online at www.batcon.org or www.batroost.com or contact Patoprsty at (828) 264-3061.