Towering 15 feet in the air, two giant bat houses stand sentinel over a Bangor field. These new constructions, built and donated to the Bangor Land Trust by Bangor resident Bill Childs, recently were erected at BLT’s West Penjajawoc Preserve.
Each “bat condo” can hold up to 2,000 bats and was designed to be the perfect home for bat maternity colonies, where baby bats are born and raised each spring.
“It’s really important to have these condos right now because bats are in extreme peril in the U.S.,” bat biologist Katelin Craven, chairperson of the BLT programs committee, said.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the bat houses on Aug. 25, Craven explained the design of the bat houses and talked about white-nose syndrome, a disease that has decimated bat populations in the U.S. in the past decade.
“Building houses like this might help them rebuild their populations,” Craven said.
White-nose syndrome was first discovered in the U.S. in 2006 in a cave in New York. Since then, it has spread rapidly, killing more than 5.7 million bats.
The disease didn’t reach Maine until spring of 2011. But by 2013, three bat species in Maine — little brown bats, northern long-eared bats and eastern small-footed bats — saw somewhere between 80 and 100 percent declines in their populations.
“It’s very important we give them the best chance at being able to successfully reproduce,” said Craven, who explained that most bats gather in maternal colonies in the spring to reproduce because there is safety and warmth in numbers.
The new bat houses in the West Penjajawoc Preserve are modeled after a design provided by Bat Conservation International, an organization dedicated to protecting the world’s more than 1,300 species of bats.
Bat house builder Bill Childs of Bangor attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony with his wife, Kathy Childs. More than 20 people joined them, hiking half a mile through the grasslands to view the houses.
Bill and Kathy Childs have enjoyed hiking the trails maintained by the BLT for years and have attended a number of the land trust’s nature programs, but it wasn’t until recently that they became more involved in the nonprofit organization and started to volunteer.
“We took our first snowshoe trek this winter with the Bangor Land Trust, cleaning out birdhouses,” Bill Childs said. “It’s kind of like paying it forward for the many wonderful blessings we’re all given.”
A retired engineer and woodworker, Bill Childs said he didn’t know quite what he signed up for when he agreed to build the bat houses for the Bangor Land Trust. Originally, he envisioned the houses being much smaller.
“Any bat house I’d ever seen is just a simple box hanging from a tree,” he said. “I looked at the design, which called for half a sheet of plywood of two different thicknesses, and I thought I might as well make two.”
The two bat houses ended up taking him about 80 hours to construct. Instead of using plastic mesh as a surface for the bats to cling to, he painstakingly cut at least 2,000 grooves into the houses’ wood compartments.
“I didn’t want to introduce plastic into their environment,” he explained.
The houses are full of small spaces that enable to bats to move around and regulate their heat.
“Bats are very picky,” Craven said. “They need specific conditions up here in Maine … they like to stuff themselves into tiny spaces and huddle together to stay warm.”
Childs painted the bat houses with nontoxic latex black paint so the houses could absorb as much heat as possible during the day. And the land trust oriented the houses in the middle of the field so they could get as much sunlight as possible.
BLT board member David Thompson, a resident of Orono, erected the houses, which ended up weighing about 85 pounds each. He placed the houses atop 15-foot poles for two reasons: safety against predators, such as racoons, and to attract the bats’ attention.
“Bats are very curious animals,” Craven said. “If things change in their environment, they inspect it. So bats that have been visiting this field for years and years, we want them to come check these out.
“We don’t expect to see any bats in the houses until next spring,” she added.
If a lot of bats take residence in the new houses, they’ll be easily detectable by the guano, or excrement, they will leave in the field, Craven said. But she also plans to detect the bats and identify what species they are with a special device made by Wildlife Acoustics that records bat echolocation calls and, with a mobile app, makes these calls audible to people.
In the future, Craven hopes the Bangor Land Trust will be able to host public programs about bats at the preserve. For now, all that’s left to do is wait for the bats to show up.
The Bangor Land Trust is always looking for volunteers and new members. For information, visit bangorlandtrust.org, call 942-1010 or email info@bangorlandtrust.org.