RCBC: Rock Creek Bat Club

Rock Creek Bat Club
I just read an article in Wired about Bats
about the importance of bats and the decline of the bat population

if Bats eat mosquitoes... why don't we try to embrace this and provide a comfort nesting place for them?

I have seen these simple wooden bat houses
anyone have any luck with bats taking an interest in their bat house?

DC is a Swamp!
summer in DC can be nasty... I can deal with the heat... I can deal with the humidity... but the mosquitoes? NO DICE ROCK SLICE! I have no love for them... especially that Asian Tiger Mosquito

what would happen if people put up these bat houses?
even better... what if some biologists with a bat background did something to attract the bats to nesting under some of the bridges of Rock Creek Park?

I am not usually a fan of man trying to get involved in the balance of nature
but really... we already have
it is our presence that has caused this imbalance
maybe a few bat houses or better yet a few bat colonies would do the city of DC well

Bats in WIRED

some time ago when traveling with my then girlfriend now wife in Indonesia
we witnessed something that was saddening
people were fishing for the bats in the sky

on the beaches at sunset these Indonesian men would fly their kites through the stream of bats that were traveling from the caves in the natural preserve to the neighboring plantations
on the kite strings were a number of fish hooks
the bats would fly past the string and get snagged

I remember getting in close and talking to these men
it saddened me... sure I knew that they had to eat
it seemed that the bat had a complex understanding of the situation... a brain with more sense of things... closer to a dog than a cow

then also... I saw a finite number of bats in the sky
and I knew that there were people pulling bats from the sky every evening
which meant that the bat population was declining at a measurable level
you could estimate the bats in the sky
you could estimate the bats that had become someone's dinner
a little math... I wonder if there are any more bats in those caves?

if the bat that was thrown on the barbecue were a mother and there was a young bat back in the cave waiting for their mother to come home from the evening feeding

enough on this...
time for me to blog about butterflies and butterfly bushes and milkweed