Halloween means trick-or-treating, costumes, horror movies … and more bad publicity for the humble bat.
To be sure, there is such a creepy creature as the vampire bat – ask Ken Gioeli, a natural resources extension agent for UF/IFAS. He studied them in Costa Rica.
But bats – despite how they’re portrayed in scary movies – don’t want to fly in your hair, or bite your neck, or turn into a human.
“That’s all Dracula movies,” Gioeli said during his Lunch and Learn at the Manatee Observation and Education Center earlier this month. The series is held on the second Friday each month and features a guest speaker on a different topic.
Despite the particularly dramatic myths surrounding bats as a whole, there are few that are specific to resident Florida bats.
They don’t eat the fruit from your trees – which means they won’t pollinate your fruit trees, either. And they don’t eat mosquitos.
Gioeli was quick to point out that the Florida bats really do eat bugs – literally tons of them – just not mosquitos, and not here in St. Lucie County.
Gioeli is a self-proclaimed “bat freak,” who helped rid the Mets stadium in St. Lucie West of the flying mammals in the late 1990s. Using special contraptions, Gioeli and his team were able to slowly migrate the bats out from the stadium’s rafters.
“They almost stopped spring training,” Gioeli said of the bats. The creatures had decided to roost above the stadium seating, which caused a bit of a public health and safety crisis. Bat droppings are neither fun to sit on nor be in contact with.
The Mets almost abandoned the stadium altogether, according to Gioeli. Instead, his team installed a one-way device on each of the bats’ entry/exit points. The device allowed the bats to get out, but wouldn’t let them back in. Over months, the entire colony flew out and couldn’t get back in.
To make up for the loss of home, Gioeli’s team built a bat house near the stadium, hoping to entice the winged animals to their new abode. Unlike in the classic baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” they built it – but no one came.
Gioeli said he suspects the bats relocated to the span of an overpass, getting in through cracks. Apparently, bats like the steady hum of traffic or other similar noises, he said.
Gioeli has also worked to rid a St. Lucie County school of a bat colony using a similar one-way device technique. In that case, though, the bats had laid claim to the gap between an exterior wall and its façade near the school’s large air conditioning unit.
As for residents, oftentimes they find bats have slipped into their attics through holes only an inch in size. Those who have them in their homes – but not in the attic – usually find them roosting under their barrel-tile roofs.
“They like these because we don’t have caves,” Gioeli said. Those colonies tend to spend the morning near the roof’s peak and, as the sun begins to warm the tiles, they scoot farther down. By the time evening comes and it’s time to go on the bug hunt, the bats are near the opening along the roof edge.
So how do you know if there are bats in the attic or under the roof? Gioeli said you’ll know from the smell, the sound and the look.
As bats leave their roost, they void their bowels. Doing so yields an unmistakable smell, and leaves a visible trace of their body oils scraped along the opening. And while bats’ echolocation is in a frequency humans cannot hear without mechanical assistance, they do vocalize within the colony, making chittering sounds.
There are several bat species that reside in Florida, including the yellow bat, the red bat, the Seminole and the hoary. The yellow bat tends to live within the “petticoat” of palm trees’ brown fronds. The red and Seminole bats like to call Spanish moss and pine trees home. The hoary prefers broadleaf trees.
According to Gioeli, there is not much residents can do to encourage bats to move into an area. Unlike attracting hummingbirds or butterflies by planting certain flowers and shrubs, bats are going to go where they want.
Case in point: the bat house nears the Mets’ stadium.
“We thought we had everything for them,” Gioeli said, explaining that it was modeled after the highly successful bat house at the University of Florida. It faced east (again, for the sun’s heat), had great ground clearance.
In 2004, the hurricanes downed the stadium bat house. It wasn’t rebuilt.
If he had the time, Gioeli told the Lunch and Learn crowd that he would love to experiment with a barrel-tile roof bat house. He envisions a large piece of wood set to the typical angle of a roof and standing 13 or 15 feet off the ground. That piece would be shingled with the tiles.
Perhaps then St. Lucie bats will find that a suitable home.
