I was at a friends yesterday and he said that he had thought there was something living in the roof of his barn because a pile of droppings had appeared. We shone a torch up the narrow crack between wall and the roof and to our surprise saw five pairs of eyes belonging to long-eared bats staring back down at us. They didn't seem to mind being woken up in the day and that we were so close, but we didn't disturb them for long.

He said that the new alarm system in the barn had been set off the other day and now he suspects it was the bats. Obviously you can't move them, so he will just have to make sure the bats can't get into the actual barn.

An interesting fact about bat droppings!!!
They look just like mouse droppings, but you can tell which is which by rubbing one between your finger & thumb (sounds yuk I know, but it's not that bad). If it crumbles into dusty particles, it is from bats as this is the remains of insects etc that it has eaten. If it just squashes, it is from a mouse.
I'm full of useless information like this!!!

No, that's not useless! As tibbar14 can tell you, everyone is also now trained to understand the word 'scat' (hehehe).

A new bat box was installed recently along my favourite bicycle path. I stopped to see if anyone was using the box yet, and did not see any droppings. But now I know how to determine if mice have crept in .

Kingfisher

Thanks to too many late-night horror films when I was young I always had a distrust of bats . However, now that I've been introduced to a few (at wildlife shows and bat walks), I think that they are amongst the most interesting and fascinating animals I've seen. My favourites are probably fruit bats. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any bats in my area.

Kingfisher got in there first with one of my favourite quotes
I like the word 'scat' it has a good sound.
We saw two bat boxes yesterday on our walk round the local wood.

Did you check to see if there were any inhabitants? I am quite eager to see bats moving into the new boxes along my bicycle trail.

Kingfisher

This post was last modified: 09-08-2007 06:47 PM by Kingfisher.

I sometimes think I see bats but would my ultrasonic cat scarer scare them away? I remember having bats in my roof when i was little but cannot say for sure if they are at my house here in bristol.

I'm sure the bats would hear it, whether it would scare them off I don't know, but it could well do.

Thanks for the tip about the droppings. It's not useless at all it would have been much easier to identify them if we had known that before.