I know, I know, I’m strange. I’m considering bats and bat houses. 😀
Here’s the thing – bats eat a lot of insects like mosquitoes. We have a lot of mosquitoes. This country has a lot of mosquitoes, so many that dengue fever is an epidemic right now. That tends to alternate with other mosquito-born illnesses, like chikungunya, malaria, and others.
Fahim and I had chikungunya last year – it wasn’t fun. Very painful. An aunt of Fahim’s had dengue a couple of years ago and a cousin had it so recently he’s still recovering. Not fun, either.
We also have a lot of other pesky insects. Cockroaches, flies, and all sorts of other things that I have no idea what they’re called. 😀 And no, I don’t know if the varieties of bats here in Sri Lanka will eat them, or if they do, which varieties of bats, and which bats are found where in this country. Yeah, total dearth of useful information. 🙂
Bats, from what I read, are declining in population because their natural habitat is being taken over by industrialization. You know, humans. 🙂 But providing shelter for them in the form of bat houses can mean the difference between bats staying in an area or not.
While in other parts of the world, you can buy bat houses, I sincerely doubt that’ll be the case here. Most likely, we’ll have to make it. And by we, I actually mean Fahim. The guys at the lumbar yard aren’t likely to speak any English, so really, it’s pretty much all up to Fahim. Poor boy. 🙁
So now it’s on to Operation Convince Fahim. 😀
If you’re looking for more info on bats and bat houses, try this PDF. It has some really good general information on attracting bats.
If you want to build your own, there are plenty of free bat house plans on the Internet – do a search and no doubt you’ll find at least dozens to hundreds.
