Overview

This building houses a small maternity colony of little brown bats during the warm months of the year, where each pregnant female gives birth to a single pup (the name used for baby bats). Typically, females begin to arrive in maternity roosts in late April and stay through late September, although a few individuals may arrive in spring as early as mid-April and stay as late as early October. Pregnant females give birth to pups over a three-week period from mid- to late June. Each pup weighs about 2 grams at birth, which is equivalent to 25% of its mother's weight. Mothers nurse their pups for about 4 weeks, but pups normally begin to fly and begin feeding on insects at the age of 3 weeks. When young first begin to fly, they are not very successful capturing flying insects, so they continue to suckle from their mothers for another week. During late lactation, mothers are voracious feeders, often eating their entire body weight each night in insects. The rest of the time during warm months, when energy demands are less, each bat typically eats about one-half its body weight each night.

Before humans constructed buildings, such as barns and houses, as well as this one, little brown bats formed maternity colonies in hollow trees. As trees were cut down to build wooden buildings, there were no places for these bats to roost. Today, many old buildings, and even some new ones, provide places for bats to roost, because there are few hollow trees available to them. The bat house at Moore State Park was designed and constructed specifically for bats in 1992. The colony of bats that now occupies the Bat House previously occupied the old blacksmith shop that was located near one of the mill ponds, located immediately downstream from the first set of waterfalls. This old building became too old and had to be demolished. Before it was demolished, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, in collaboration with Boston University, constructed this Bat House that now hosts over 700 adult female bats.

Each evening, bats emerge from this and other similar building during the warm months to feed on aquatic insects, moths, beetles, and other flying insects, some of which are pests of gardens and forest trees.

The Bat House is also an important resource for studying bats. Of recent interest is a disease affecting populations of bats called "white nose syndrome" that is poorly understood but has lead to a significant decline in bat populations in New York and increasingly in New England states. The video camera attached to the Bat House serves as a means to enable counting of the bats as they emerge each evening. Through the observation and census of the bats, we hope to understand the health of the bat population at Moore State Park, and the health of New England bat populations in general.

For more information about these delightful animials, and video clips of the bats during emergence, you can explore the web site at the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology.

The equipment and installation are maintained by the Multimedia Communications Laboratory at Boston University as part of a project to develop technology for enabling low-cost ecological monitoring of remote sites.

Acknowledgement: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0721884. We also thank the Department of Conservation and Recreation and the staff at Moore State Park for providing access to the bat house.

Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Contacts: Thomas Little, Boston University (tdcl at bu.edu); Thomas Kunz, Boston University (kunz at bu.edu).