Building a Better Bat House

A plan for building, assembling, installing, and maintaining a modern bat house.

Building bat houses to proper specifications, placing them in the "best" habitat, and maintaining the houses every few years will maximize the chances of a colony forming on your property. If not built and placed properly, there may not be any visitors at all.

BCM has assembled detailed plans to enable do-it-yourselfers to build their own bat house similar to the 3 chamber kits presently available in our catalog. But getting plans is just part of the project. We show step by step photographs of the assembly process and offer a chapter on selecting the right shade of paint.We describe how to look for a good installation site, and what pitfalls to watch out for. A chapter on post installs will explain how to get the 50 lb. 7- chamber bat house safely in the air. A section on maintenance includes what to do with wasps, hornets, woodpeckers, overheating problems, and how to inventory your bats. Finally, a short informative chapter on bats and rabies, histoplasmosis, what to do with guano rounds out the book.

The book contains plans for a highly successful seven chamber bat box and also a three chamber bat box. These plans are very similar to the successful boxes sold today by BCM.

These plans have not required updating for quite awhile because they simply have stood the test of time and are quite similar to the plans currently available from some state wildlife agencies today. These plans share the spirit of any modern bat house style maternity roost, but are presented in a way as to require as few power tools as possible, so are suited for anyone with a basic circular saw and power drill. The end result will be a a bat house functionally identical to BCM's 3-Chamber Kit, but with a simple straight-cut vent and roost baffles that can be made with a circular saw rather than a table saw with dado blades.

Available as an Instant Download . . . you will receive an immediate email with a download link.

Please check your spam/junk mail folder for an email from: Your Instant Download from Bat Conservation and Management