Bat Habitat and Foods

Understand the feeding habits of bats. 

If you want to attract bats to your home, the likeliest way is to guarantee a ready supply of food.

• The small bats that occupy much of the temperate regions fly at night and use echolocation to find the flying insects that make up most of their diet. If you do not have insects outside of your home at night, you may not be able to attract bats.
  
  
• Larger tropical bats live primarily on a diet of fruit and nectar. They may search widely over the course of a year looking for ripening fruits or flowering plants.
  
  
• A single little brown bat (myotis) can eat up to 1000 mosquitoes in a single hour, and is one of the world's longest-lived mammals for its size, with life spans of almost 40 years. Bats are more closely related to shrews or primates than rodents.

Bat Habitat

Bat boxes are used by brown long-eared bats, both to roost and breed. Place a few in your garden at different heights and facing different directions. Pipistrelles are most likely to breed in your bat house. They like cavity walls and spaces under the eaves in modern houses. Pipistrelles fly along walls, taller hedges (about 5-6') and tree lines to minimize the risk of predation. It is important to provide secure flyways to and from their roosts than anything else.. White street lights attract clusters of insects, which are often exploited by pipistrelles. They can be seen flying through the pool of light to grab their prey.

Brown long-eared bats use porches as feeding perches to eat larger prey. Note discarded moth wings and other insect remains on the ground. Droppings on a window sill or stuck to a wall are usually the first sign that bats are using a house as a base of operations.. They are easy to recognize from the finely chewed bits of insects that fall to the ground.

Bats swoop through the air at night, snatching up hundreds of insects and other small animals. During the day, they hardly move at all. Instead, bats pass the time hanging upside down in a secluded spot, such as the roof of a cave, the underside of a bridge or the inside of a hollowed-out tree.

There are a couple different reasons why bats roost upside down this way. Mostly, it puts them in an ideal position for takeoff. Bats can't launch themselves into the air from the ground, their wings don't produce enough lift to take off from a dead stop.  Their hind legs are so small and underdeveloped that they can't run to build up the necessary takeoff speed either. Instead, they use their front claws to climb to a high spot, and then fall into flight. When they sleep upside down in a high location, they are all set to launch if they need to escape quickly.

Hanging upside down is also a great adaptation to hide from danger. When most predators are active (particularly birds of prey), bats hang out (literally) where few animals would think to look and most can't reach. This allows them to disappear from the world until night comes again. There's little competition for these roosting spots, since other flying animals don't have the ability to hang upside down

A bat's talons use tendons that are connected only to the upper body, not to a muscle. To hang upside down, a bat flies into position, pulls its claws open with other muscles and finds a surface to grip. To grab hold of the surface, the bat simply lets its body relax. The weight of the upper body pulls down on the tendons connected to the talons, causing them to clench. The talon joints lock into position, and the bat's weight keeps them closed so he can relax and rest without using any energy.  If a bat were to die while hanging upside down, it wouldn't fall but would continue to hang there until jostled loose by another bat!

Bats: Natural Pest Controller

The little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus, is the most common species of bat in North America. Mosquitoes are annoying when you want to have a barbecue, and pipistrelles love to eat large numbers of them, along with other small insects.They are insectivores, meaning their diet consists primarily of insects, and luckily for us, they have a huge appetite. Bats can greatly reduce the population of mosquito's and other bothersome insects such as moths, wasps, beetles, gnats, midges and mayflies. Bats are known to consume more than 600 mosquitos per hour, or half their body weight in insects each night.

Bats like a diversity of habitats, particularly areas with mature trees and water, so wooded parks, canals and riverbanks are good places to start. Many species dislike flying across open areas, because they are  vulnerable to predators– most bat deaths are due to birds of prey, and weasels so provide safe flyways through your neighborhood with trees and overgrown hedges to increase the chances that bats will use your garden.

Remember, there are far more insects in the canopy than close to the ground, and it is here that bats mostly feed – if you have space for trees, they will do more than anything to attract bats to your garden.