Bat House Forum

[Gran]

I recently built a BBQ smoker from Cinderblocks.  To make the chimney I used a kind of block with notch cut out of corner.(lintel block?)  here is a picture from construction



 

What do you think is possibility of bats using a entrance like that in a cinderblock stack as a bat house.  I was thinking that I could cap it off at top and make the opening at any height that I wanted.  This would give a 2  4X4 columns .   This would be similar to hollow tree.

 Seriously thinking of incorperating something like this into one side of chimney for chimney swifts.  There would not be a common opening for bats and swifts.  Any thoughts? 

[Terry Lobdell]

Gran, BCI has some pictures of very successful cement block bat houses.

I inquired about the possiblity of a combo bat house/chimney swift tower and was told that it has been tried in the past and bat bugs killed the baby chimney swifts.

I would love to have a chimney swift tower. There are some really good plans on a couple different websites.

[Gran]

I had heard the same info about the bugs but my thinking was that they wouldn't be sharing common areas. I guess another alternative could to attach bat house to outside of masonary chimney structure

[Gran]

Terry, do you have any information on the BCI towers.  I looked at their site and only found one picture(at least where I looked) and no detailed information

[Terry Lobdell]

Gran, I am pretty sure I saw an article about it in their bat house researcher's archives. I will look for it and post the link if I find it.......I also think there have been articles about it in Bats magazine.

[Terry Lobdell]

Gran, here is a link to an article in BCI's e-newsletter about cement block bat towers.

http://www.batcon.org/news2/scripts/article.asp?articleID=178&newsletterID=26

[Erik]

Gran, I think it is not a strange idea at all. The Bat Tower Terry mentioned are very promising and provide suitable roosts for bat species that don't use "standard" chambered bat houses.

But I was wondering. In the Netherlands a lot of bat enthousiast have build artificial (semi-)underground hibernation roosts. Materials used are often concrete blocks or concrete tubes, normal bricks, ceramic blocks and also these cinderblocks.
I realised that I have never heard about special build artificial underground roosts for bats in the USA. Are there?

Erik

[Gran]

here is a link to one that someone built in Texas

http://www.batcon.org/batsmag/v15n4-4.html