Have you watched bats swooping insects? If you visit a park with streetlights at night and watch - you may be lucky! Insect eating microbats are alive
and well in your area.
Construct your own roosting box to help out tiny bats. This design is suitable for most kinds of Australian microbats.
Adult help is required to make this project.
You will need
3 cm thick plantation pine or structural or external pine plywood. Rough-sawn or even secondhand timber is ideal, although you must make sure it is
free of nails and paint.
Screws
1 or 2 hinges
A piece of old rubber tyre
Shade cloth, mesh or bark
Staple gun and staples
Wire
Old piece of garden hose or a nail and hammer
Instructions
Cut your pieces as the per sizes on the diagram below.
Screw your pieces together except for the top/roof.
Attach the top/roof piece to the box with a hinge so you can open and close it.
Attach the piece of rubber so that it's covering the hinged bits of wood - this will help waterproof it.
Screw a couple of off-cuts on the inside of the roof so that it sits snugly.
Staple shadecloth, mesh or bark to all inner surfaces, and your backboard.
Choose your location - you want somewhere shaded during the hottest part of the day, but not in full shade all day. Trim a few branches in front of
the box to allow an uninterrupted flight path.
Thread wire through the garden hose and attach to back of box to hang from a tree, or nail your box to a tree about 3-5 m high.
Better still, make 3 boxes and hang at the same height on 3 different sides of the tree. The bats will move between them to find the right temperature
at different times of day and during different seasons.
Be a backyard buddy
It’s easy. All you have to do is care... and take a few simple steps. Backyard Buddies are the native plants and animals that
share our urban areas, waterways, backyards and parks.
Backyard Buddies are also the people who value native wildlife and want to protect it.
