Bats are the Kobayashis of the animal kingdom.

Just to refresh your memory, Takeru “The Tsunami” Kobayashi is the competitive eater who holds the world record for eating 53¾ hot dogs in twelve minutes.

Against that, pound for pound, I’ll put the average bat, which can eat upwards of 1,200 mosquitoes in a single hour. That’s why you want to attract all the bats you can, and that’s why you need a bat house.

Actually, you probably already have bats around your house; there are about nine different species here on the Island. They live in hollowed-out tree trunks, barns – maybe even up under the eaves of your house.

According to Gus Ben David, director of the World of Reptiles and Birds Park in Edgartown, the big and little brown bats are the most common ones on the Island. We also have red bats, which are unique because they occasionally fly around during the day.

Gus is a huge bat fan and claims that bat houses, or as he calls them, “bat boxes,” definitely work. The traditional bat box is just that: a rectangular box made of exterior plywood or cedar with a three-quarter to one-inch slot at the bottom for the bats to get in and out. The front and back inside walls should be covered with some type of mesh or grooved about every quarter of an inch so that the bats can get traction. A bat box that measures 24 inches tall, 13 inches wide, and 3 inches deep can accommodate 100 bats.

The bat house should be mounted at least 15 feet high, facing south to get maximum sunlight. At this latitude, overheating is not a problem. In fact, according to Gus, bats can tolerate about the highest heat of any mammal; some bat nurseries have been known to reach temperatures of 130 to 140 degrees.

Houses can be mounted on poles, in trees, or on buildings. It may take longer for bats to occupy a house in a tree because bats find the houses by sight, and if leaves are obscuring a bat house, it’s harder to find.

If you’re not up to building your own bat house, there are assembled versions online, as well as at garden stores on the Vineyard. But Gus has what he says is an even better alternative: Just use a regular birdhouse. Gus has several traditional swallow houses mounted onto and next to his house, and he finds that for some reason they work even better than his bat house. And since the houses are so small, they don’t require any mesh or grooved walls inside.

One thing that Gus emphasizes, however, is that whether it’s a birdhouse or a bat house, paper wasps will undoubtedly use it for nesting, so it must be checked and cleaned periodically. One reason Gus prefers his birdhouses is that they have hinged front panels, which make them easy to access.

“And if you really want to have some fun,” says Gus, “during the day, if you’re careful, you can open up the front door and see the bats hanging in there.”
To quote my wife: “Yeah, that’ll happen.”