This view below is to the north and shows the distance to the closest tree in that direction, about 75 or 80 feet. The nearest tree to the south is about 25 or 30 feet away. Its hard to tell from the pictures with all the trees around, but the house has a very open path for access from both north and south. I'm quite hopeful about this one's success. In watching the bats fly around at night, this is right in their flight pattern. As a matter of fact, we had a bat in our other house last night and when he came out he looked like he nearly ran into this house. My husband joked that he was thinking, "Whoa! Where'd that thing come from?!" This is a spot that was previously unavailable due to a tree about 6 feet away. You can see the tree my husband cut down about 2 weeks ago is still laying in the yard, waiting for us to buy a chipper. It had been nearly horizontal (!!) after an ice storm.
The houses are mounted back-to-back, and we went ahead and put some baffles in between to make a couple extra chambers instead of just hollow space. We ended up having to make the center baffles between houses double thick, though, since the spaces would have been too narrow if we tried to make 3 chambers between houses instead of 2, giving a total of 8 chambers.
Seems we had a little brown possibly visit the first night, assuming what I found on the ground below where I spread a bed sheet was actually guano. I do know that its not a bug.
I tried to look up into the house and see if anyone was still there, but its too cloudy to see anything, and I don't want to risk scaring anyone away with a flashlight. In retrospect, I don't think we've ever had little browns before, as the guano I had seen last year was a bit bigger than this. Funny, as I had always thought we had little browns but was apparently wrong.
