We’ve all heard the horror stories: Bats carry rabies! Bats are just pests and need to be exterminated like mosquitos or fleas! Bats will attack if you’re walking outside at night! Vampire bats really do suck human blood!
Well, two guys from Kentucky say all of the above are myths perpetrated in popular culture. To prove the creatures actually are beneficial, they’ve built habitats that will attract the winged mammals to your yard.
“Ever since Bram Stoker brought Dracula back a long, long time ago, he could have picked any other animal to demonize, but he had to pick a bat,” said Christopher Rannefors, one of the creators of BatBnB, the Lexington-based company that sells bat-friendly habitats designed to give the small animals homes when they come out of hibernation. “Everyone is afraid of bats for no good reason.”
Bats have gotten a bad rap, but in reality, Rannefors said they are excellent for pest control—they can eat more than 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour—and they are actually clean animals that groom themselves much like cats. It’s extremely rare for a bat to bite humans, and if it does happen, it’s typically in self-defense.
“The odds of getting rabies from a bat are so infinitesimally small, you’re more likely to catch leprosy or get killed by your own lawnmower than [be harmed by] a bat,” Rannefors said. “What we wanted to go and do is change the branding around bats, especially at this time when they’re so badly in need of our support.”
Rannefors and his business partner, Harrison Broadhurst, researched and developed a new kind of bat house that not only would provide a suitable home but also would be aesthetically pleasing to their customers. BatBnB was introduced to the market in July 2017 via the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, and sales exceeded the pair’s expectations by 200 percent in the first month.
“We had a really hot start, and we got some good press,” Rannefors said. “We continue to be successful … and sales are still rolling in.”
Rannefors and Broadhurst with their stylish and functional bat houses.
In the Batginning …
Rannefors and Broadhurst were bored and wanted to find something to do while their wives completed their medical degrees at the University of Kentucky.
“We had a kind of 9-to-5 situation going on. In the evenings, our wives would still be working, so Harrison and I would often get together and play video games, just hang out, just take it easy,” Rannefors said. “Then we looked at ourselves and said, ‘You know what? We should be more productive with our lives.’ We didn’t originally know what we wanted to do, but we knew we wanted to do something … I’ve always been excited about product innovation and design, and Harrison’s an amazing architect and planner.”
That was 2016. After months of brainstorming and being bombarded with stories of the Zika virus, West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses, the two settled on finding a way to improve pest control.
Rannefors tapped into his childhood memories of helping his dad build bat houses. Broadhurst’s mother was a biology teacher who often taught her students how bats affect the environment. With further research, they realized just how critical a role bats play as Mother Nature’s mosquito exterminator.
They also discovered the mammals are facing hard times.
For the past decade or so, bats have been dying by the hundreds of thousands due to deforestation, the proliferation of wind turbines and the nationwide spread of white-nose syndrome.
“[It’s] unfortunate, because wind turbines are a great form of alternative energy, but what happens is that the wind turbines draw a lot of insects, which draw the bats to the insects,” Rannefors said. “The bats go near the blades of the fan, and there’s actually a decrease in air pressure that causes internal bleeding in the lungs of the bats.”
Rannefors said there’s a movement to encourage operators to reduce the fan blade speed by a “small percentage,” which would lead to a 60 percent decrease in bat lives lost.
“But that small decrease costs lots of money,” he said. “It’s a tough negotiation [with the turbine industry].”
Then there’s white-nose syndrome. A fungus that’s believed to have come from Europe grows on the bats’ noses and disrupts their hibernation. Without adequate food and low fat reserves, the bats starve to death before spring—the time when they’re supposed to come out of hibernation.
According to Texas-based Bat Conservation International (BCI), millions of bats have succumbed to the disease, causing “massive” population declines of multiple species. BCI is working with several conservation groups to help locate and identify where the disease is spreading in an effort to prevent otherwise unaffected bats from getting the deadly fungus.
A third, and more commonly known, cause of the bat population decline is the removal of traditional bat habitats.
Merlin Tuttle, a leading bat conservationist, said that, while white-nose syndrome is a concern, he’s troubled by the loss of bats’ best roosting sites due to deforestation, urban development and even the decline of wood as a building material. The Texas resident said bats would typically “follow the wood” and make their new roosting homes in log cabins and wooden structures.
“There were lots of old wooden barns where bats lived, and now you look at your modern structures, and they’re mostly metal and not suitable for bat roosting,” Tuttle said.
Taking Flight
After they learned of the predicament of the bat population, Broadhurst and Rannefors became convinced they needed to do something that would help not only humans but also a species critical to the environment.
“We worked very closely with [Tuttle] on our product line … and it was very important to us to have his blessing as we made this product because we wanted it to be right for the animals,” Rannefors said.
Tuttle described the BatBnBs, which are manufactured in Missouri, as “nicely designed” and mentioned that they satisfied the need to provide an attractive addition to backyards while giving bats a safe place to hide from their natural predators, snakes.
“They’ll climb up and get in the roost to eat bats,” Tuttle said of snakes. “And if the bat is in a roost where the partition is no more than three-quarters of an inch wide, the snake will poke his head in to get the bat, and the bat opens his mouth, covers the space, and the snake just ends up sticking his nose in the bats mouth and gets bit. [Rannefors and Broadhurst] went to special effort to combine aesthetic and architectural beauty in a bat house to make it something you might want to put up on your property and look at, and it meets the needs of bats.”
An Attractive Safe Haven
Rannefors said they wanted their customers to buy something “pretty” for their home.
“That may sound silly, but it’s actually really valuable,” he said, “because most bat houses on the market are boring, small, plain boxes, and they’re ugly and not nice to look at. If someone is inclined to get a bat house, they will buy one of those, and they will stick it out in the back of their yard, behind some tree, really far back where no oneis going to see it. That defeats the purpose.
“I want people to buy something they can really be proud of and put in their yard and enhance the beauty of their home and add to the beauty of their yard.”
Rannefors calls it a win-win situation.
“You’re offering an amazing, safe habitat for an animal that needs it,” he said. “In turn, they’re going to eat so many mosquitoes and so many pests and garden bugs and things that you don’t want in your garden or around you and your friends.”
It’s also a way to educate others and dispel the myths surrounding the often-maligned creatures.
“Anybody who puts up a bat house is obviously saying, ‘Hey, I don’t believe this stuff,’ ” Tuttle said.
Buyers spend roughly $200 to add a BatBnB to their yard, with the money going directly back into the business.
“We might be able to make some money out of this one day,” Rannefors said. “But at the end of the day, we started this because we were really excited to help these animals, and the more that we can grow the business and get the bat houses out there, the happier we will be."
For more information and to purchase a bat house, visit batbnb.com.