November 21st 2008 • HOME •

Bats in Our Belfry?

You go out in the evening after sunset, look up, and against the darkening Fire Island sky you see birds flying frantically around. Wait a minute, those aren't birds, they're man's second best friend.

Bats have had bad press. But in evaluating the desirability of having bats around, one must do a rough-and-ready "cost benefit" analysis. Bats, after all, are not saints. On rare occasion people who have been "bitten" by them contract rabies. But in the United States and Canada there are only one or two cases of bat rabies per year. Actually mosquitoes spread far more decease than do bats, and bats eat huge numbers of mosquitoes--thousands of them in a single night. So maybe they're not such bad guys after all.

True, you probably don't want bats taking up residence inside your beach house. If they are there, there are ways to coax them out (by putting in simple one-way doors at their point of ingress), and into your very own easy-to-assemble bat house.

Bats are really quite fascinating, even loveable (maybe). To learn more about bats and how to protect them, you won't want to miss Bat Conservation International. For details on various species and their living habits, check out Environment Canada's great bat site. To sort out which are, and are not, endangered species, consult the USFW.

On Fire Island, the most commonly seen bat is the Little Brown Bat. But we also have the Eastern Red Bat and (less commonly) the Silver-haired Bat. None of these weighs more than half an ounce, though they all have wingspans of at least 9 inches.

Updated 21 May 2003.