Another pest/ally surprised me this month and has drawn me further into the life webs: bats! Cut to the chase: I'm building a bat house this winter. Or buying one and putting it up. Fingers crossed. We need to get a small population of bats out of our eaves. Michael is planning to seal up the crack they're getting into after they vacate for the winter. I'm going to find and apply deterrent fragrant oils. And I'm going to set up a better bat house--because bat populations are declining, and we have them, and they are keeping down the mosquitos that should have been eating me alive with all the rain we had the past month in our moist woods! This one has heavier consequences than the carpenter bees. I need to get this right, because...having a bat infestation is no joke! But they were also magical, during our encounter and I want to try. Along the way, I discovered a new bit of magic about some of the trees in our forests: sweet birches.

READ POST/TRANSCRIPT: https://www.katymorikawa.com/out-hunting-in-the-evening-light---with-bats/ LINKS: Sweet birch, Betula lenta on wildflower.org https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=BELE  Betula lenta at Native Plant Finder https://www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder/Plants/398 Merlin Tuttle's "Selecting a Quality Bat House" https://www.merlintuttle.org/selecting-a-quality-bat-house/  8 Scents that Bats Hate https://pestpointers.com/scents-that-bats-hate-and-how-to-use-them How to Build a Bat House (YouTube video) https://youtu.be/WPlkXifGJ9M Shop bat houses at BatBnB https://www.batbnb.com/shop Bat hanging guide https://www.batbnb.com/hanging-guide Bat house FAQ https://www.batbnb.com/faq Big brown bat. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:33, August 30, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_brown_bat&oldid=1101798043