Bats can sometimes get a bad reputation, but before we judge them, here are three really big benefits that bats provide:
1) Pest control
They eat millions and millions of night-flying insects
They help control agricultural pests – farmers love the work bats do!
2) Pollinate
Bats help ensure production of seeds and fruit – again, the farmer’s friend!
They improve genetic diversity
If you love bananas, or avocados, or peaches, or cashews – thank bats. These foods depend on pollination by bats.
3) Disperse seed
Bats help to restore lost or damaged rain forest. They are more effective seed dispensers than birds.
So give bats a break. Learn about them and learn to protect them. Add a bat box. Do whatever you can to help these beneficial creatures of the night.
Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. With extremely elongated fingers and a wing membrane stretched between, the bat’s wing anatomically resembles the human hand. Almost 1,000 bat species can be found worldwide. In fact, bats make up a quarter of all mammal species on earth! 70% of bats consume insects, sharing a large part of natural pest control, reducing the need for pesticides, and locate their prey by means of echolocation.
Bat habitats have two basic requirements: “roosts”, where they spend the day or hibernate, and “places for foraging”. Bat roosts can be found in hollows, crevices, foliage, and even human-made structures, and include “tents” the bats construct by biting leaves.
With the above said, we know having bats roosting around your home or outbuildings can be a nuisance. That’s where Gold Miner Pest Control can come out to Auburn/Colfax/ and surrounding foothill areas and help you seal up your home and/or outbuildings to prevent the bats roosting and calling your home theirs.
Mother bats have their babies in the Auburn area in the late Spring, early Summer, so we like to wait until the end of August or first part of September in the foothills to come out and do any type of sealing up around houses and/or outbuildings, so we make sure the babies get out and don’t get sealed inside.
Of course, you can’t properly solve your bat problem until you find out how they are getting into the building. This requires a very detailed inspection of the whole structure. We must pour over every inch of your foothill home and/or outbuilding, and we must have a sharp eye. Bats can enter a cap as small as 3/8 of an inch! Experience definitely helps when doing a home or outbuilding inspection for bats. A knowledge of their behavior, and of the often subtle signs they leave behind, helps a great deal in identifying all the entry points. You must identify 100% of the entry points, or the bat removal job will fail. We are extremely knowledgeable of identifying access points for bats in the Auburn area.
For more information on bats and/or removal or to set up an appointment with a technician to come out and bid having your home and/or outbuilding sealed, give Gold Miner Pest Control a call at (530) 346-8379. We’d be happy to service your bat needs in the Auburn/Colfax/and surrounding foothill area.