Hi, we just got a bat box as a gift. I would love to hang it up and help some bats. I am trying to figure out the best location for my box. I live in coastal southern California (San Diego County). As with most California homes, our lot is very small and there isn't a lot of space to put it. I have three large Queen Palms in my back yard. I was thinking this might be a place to put it and attach it to the tree. Is this something that would work? Or should I consider putting a post next to it.

One other thing. I know there are barn owls living near by, because in the early morning I can see and hear them on top of neighbors roofs. Also, there are hawks around as well. Will this deter the bats from our location completely? I know there is a healthy population of bats in our area due to a large preserve basically across the main street from our neighborhood. And finally, I do have 3 dogs that come in our back yard. Would it be better to place in the front yard?

Or do I just not have a good location for a bat house and should consider finding a different property for it?

Any advice would be welcome. I love bats. There are so good for the ecosystem. I would love to encourage their population.

Thanks.

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure this is the right place to ask, so I apologize in advance. My girlfriend is set on studying chemistry with bioscience as her undergrad beginning next year, and has a pretty good idea of what graduate studies to pursue that are related to chemistry. However, she also loves bats. Like, a lot. Is there an academic path to go from chemistry to chiropterology (or, from what I understand, wildlife conservation)?

Any input would be greatly appreciated!

Please forgive me as I know nothing about bats but also struggle with severe animal sensitivity. I work in a historic building and we had a bat roosting on one of our door ledges. I wanted to put him back up in our attic to finish hibernating for the winter but my boss said outside only. I trapped him after watching some (hours worth) of videos and reading articles on how to humanly catch them. He would not fly from the box. he seemed terrified and kept clinging to the box. I brought him back inside to try and talk to my boss and I'm thinking he was just dazed from waking up because once I brought him back inside to show him, he ended up getting scared again and flying back out of the box. After what seemed like a traumatizing 20 minutes, I was able to get him back in the box after finding him perched on another ledge. I know it scared him so bad because it took like 5 minutes of me trying to scoop him into the box (he was positioned in a corner). I don't think I hurt him, but I definitely traumatized this little guy. I finally got him to fly out of the box the second time, but he immediately latched on to the side of the building next to us. I figured he would've flown to a new spot in the middle of the night but this morning he was still there. I'm assuming now he's back in hibernating mode, but I live in Michigan, and it gets so cold at night.

Is he okay, will he be okay?

My family and I were wanting to put up a bat house with a camera on the inside to watch them, I was wondering what kind would work best? We’d like to be able to watch a live feed of them, thanks!

This was an interesting choice for a Coors light cardboard sign advertisement, but he's still pretty cute. I was recently going through my batty stuff collection and decided to show some of it here so here's the start of that 😊

Hi I have a question about bat mating since I cannot really find any info about this online I was hoping some bat enlightened peeps can help me. Is it true that some species of bats mate while flying?