BAT WORLD SANCTUARY

We`ve got a new *limited time* design available!

This style will be available via FLOAT - For Love Of All Things for the next week, with the proceeds benefiting the bats here at the sanctuary. ❤

See our story for the link!

Happy #BatAppreciationMonth! 🦇

Despite the name, the big brown bat is a micro-bat that only weighs between 12g and 22g. Their fur color varies from pale to dark brown. The big brown bat is a common species from northern South America to southern Canada. They roost in caves, attics of houses, cabins and barns. As with all bats, big browns are highly intelligent. Females form colonies to raise their young. Pups are born once a year, during the summer months, with a single pup or occasionally twins being born. Big brown bats have lifespans reaching more than 23 years in captivity and 19 years in the wild. This species emerges around dusk to feed on insects. Big browns are important controllers of many agricultural insect pests because they feed on crop damaging moths and beetles. A single bat can eat between 3,000 and 5,000 insects per night.

It’s Bat Appreciation Month!

Consider this: if your day includes soap, shampoo, cosmetics, a toothbrush and toothpaste, coffee, margarine, paper or ink, cushions, wood furniture, fuel or lubricating fluids, sisal used to make rope and twine, timber, boats or canoes, trees, life saving medicines, air fresheners, candles, rubber, chewing gum, spices, vegetables, fruits, chocolate or even margaritas or beer, you are not only involved with bats, you are dependent upon bats.

About seventy percent of all bats are insect eaters that feed on a tremendous diversity of bugs including the pests that consume the crops we need to survive. Each bat is capable of eating a whopping 5,000 insects per night; a lactating female will eat twice that amount. The 20 million bats that roost at Bracken Cave in Texas, eat 200 tons of insects each summer evening. Bats eat crop pests that cost farmers billions of dollars annually. Insect control by bats keeps down prices of fruits and vegetables in the market place.

About thirty percent of bats eat fruit or nectar although there are a few fish eating and frog eating bats, and only three species are vampire bats (none in the U.S.). Bats pollinate or disperse the seeds of many valuable plants and trees including wild banana, avocado, date, fig, mango, eucalyptus and balsa wood, just to name a few. Some seeds will not sprout unless they have passed through the digestive tracts of a bat. Bats spread millions of seeds every year from the ripe fruit they eat. It is the fruit bats that are responsible for 98% of the reforestation of the world’s rain forests (the lungs of our planet). Without fruit bats we would lose entire forests without felling a single tree.

So yes, appreciate bats. They are beautiful and they bring us life.

#BatAppreciationMonth

Happy Bat Appreciation Month!

Contrary to popular belief, bats are not aggressive in the least, and are actually quite shy. Like birds, rabbits, racoons, and other wildlife, bats are much more afraid of us than we are of them. Bats are also very smart, rating with chimps and dolphins in their level of intelligence. Bottom line is that bats are shy, gentle and intelligent and they only want to exist peacefully on this planet, just like we do. 🙂