BCI's North American Bat House Research Project helps California farmers with pest control
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Austin, TX In June of 2001, Bat Conservation International's (BCI) North American Bat House Research Project received a grant from the Organic Farming Research Foundation, a leading supporter of organic farms, to fund a new bats and farming initiative. This new project is designed to aid farmers in the natural reduction of crop pests by installing bat houses in lieu of pesticide use. Bat houses are multi-chambered roosts designed to resemble the tight crevices that bats naturally inhabit, such as in caves and cliffs.
> Funds were used to purchase, install, and monitor 45 bat houses on 10 organic farms throughout central California. The crops that will benefit include fruit and nut crops in the Fresno region, and rice, alfalfa, and vegetables near Sacramento.
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> In the first 90 days, 40% of the sites attracted Mexican free-tailed bats, one of the most valuable controllers of crop pests. This frequency is a quick inhabitance rate for summer installation, and suggests an excellent response over the coming year.
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> Mexican free-tailed bats devour enormous quantities of armyworm, corn earworm, cutworm and codling moths, and leafhoppers, pests that cost American farmers more than a billion dollars annually. Other expected bat house inhabitants include big brown bats, which prey upon cucumber beetles and stinkbugs and little brown myotis, which feed upon leafhoppers, small beetles and moths. A colony of big brown bats from a single bat house can catch enough cucumber beetles each summer to protect local farmers from an invasion of rootworm larva. One little brown myotis can eliminate more than a thousand mosquito-sized insects in just one hour.
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> ?I am very pleased to have bats occupy houses so quickly, which is evidence that the project is working,? says Rachael Freeman Long, co-investigator for the grant project and Farm Advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. ?We've come a long way over the past seven years in maximizing the site location for the bat houses. This project is ideal for farms where bat habitat, such as tree hollows, is limited or non-existent.?
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> BCI's Building Homes for Bats video and The Bat House Builder's Handbook demonstrate how farmers across the country are relying on bat houses to reduce pests. For more information about BCI's research and bat houses, please contact rrooney@b... or visit us on the web at http://www.batcon.org/bhra/index.html.
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> BCI is a nonprofit organization, dedicated to the preservation of bats and bat habitats worldwide. BCI is recognized as the international leader in bat conservation and management initiatives. The organization employs a staff of 34 and is supported by 14,000 members in 62 countries. Contact Bob Benson for more information at bbenson@b... or Rebecca Rooney at rrooney@b... or call 512.327.9721.