How to Live With Bats in Texas
Bats are an important part of the ecosystem here in Texas. They even contribute to local tourism.
When they stay outside of your home, bats are a boon. They eat insects, pollinate plants, and disperse seeds. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that bats eat enough pests to save more than $1 billion yearly in crop damage and pesticide costs. They aren't aggressive and are largely misunderstood.
So we can't live without them, but we also don't want to live with them. When bats get into a home or business, they do an incredible amount of damage. They spread disease, infest buildings with bat mites, and cause both structural damage and a mighty stink with their powerful guano.
A bat colony only has to live in a home for a short time to devalue the property or chase away customers or tenants.
So What Can You Do About These Texas Bats?
- Don't waste money on gimmick control methods. You can't chase bats away with sonic systems or cayenne pepper. There isn't enough peppermint spray in the universe to chase bats from a building once they decide to be your permanent tenants.
- Avoid attempted bat murder. Bats are protected in the state of Texas, so resist the urge to invest in traps or poisons. Aiming your gun at them won't help much, either.
- Erect some bat boxes. Bat boxes can help you divert bats to a more favorable location. Alternatively, you can add an owl statue to your roof if you don't want a bat box. It won't chase away bats if they're already inside your home, but it might make bats think twice about nesting in your attic. You'll have to move the statue once every three months to keep them afraid of it.
- Call us to schedule an inspection. We'll be looking for entry methods. Bats can get into a ⅝" hole. While you probably could spend your entire weekend seeking out every hole, letting us do it for you is probably a better use of your time. Plus, if we find anything, we've got infective commercial-grade exclusion methods ready for deployment, and you won't.
- If bats are already in your home, trust us to remove them and exclude them from future entry. Our methods are humane and effective.
You'll want to invest in some clean-up once you've chased bats out of your home. We recommend several excellent removal and abatement companies here in the Houston area, and we'll be glad to refer you to one of them when we're done trapping your bats.
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Our goal is to take time to evaluate each customers situation and customize proven results to solve it. If you are looking for a professional solution for your Bat Removal needs, please contact us today.
Do Bat Boxes Work?
A bat box or bat house provides housing for bats. Conservation organizations promote them as a way to help and sustain bat populations, as well as a way to control insect populations. Texas Heritage for Living even went so far as to claim every backyard should have a bat box.
They can also help you keep bats out of your home. You provide the bats with a safe place of their own. However, they aren't a foolproof solution and won't encourage bats to move out of your attic if they're already there.
What to Do Before You Set Up Your Box
We recommend calling us to conduct a home inspection before setting up your bat box. Why? Because if you're going to invite bats to hang around in your yard, you want to make sure you've excluded them from your home.
Remember, bats can fit through holes as narrow as ⅝ of an inch, so you're not necessarily going to spot and caulk all those holes on a casual inspection.
By allowing us to perform some preliminary exclusion, you increase your chances of keeping the bats out of your home even as you're helping them.
Where to Set Up Your Bat House
You can buy commercial bat houses or make your own, but location matters. You can't attach them to trees, for example, because the branches create flight obstacles for the bats and offer bat predators such as owls a nice place to perch and catch them.
You'll want to raise them roughly 15 feet off the ground in an area that gets a lot of sun and has a water source nearby. We recommend securing them to tall poles rather than placing them in the eaves of your building, as you don't want them noticing small holes in your roof and getting bright ideas about other places where they might like to live.
Amazon allows you to purchase a telescoping bat box pole (and bat boxes themselves), as do many other retail stores.
Get Help Today
If bats work their way into your home despite your efforts to provide them with some housing of their own, don't fret. It's important to take care of the problem immediately to prevent damage and disease from bat guano, but you can rest assured that your bat box probably didn't cause the problem. We have so many bats in Houston that it's futile to chase them out of your yard completely.
Contact our team to gently pull those bat families from your attic and then exclude them from further entry so they stay in your yard where they belong.
REQUEST A FREE INSPECTION
Our goal is to take time to evaluate each customers situation and customize proven results to solve it. If you are looking for a professional solution for your Bat Removal needs, please contact us today.
3 Bat Prevention Tips
If there's anything Texas has plenty of, it's bats. They've even become a local tourist attraction.
We love to see them in the night sky, but nobody loves to have them in their home. Here are a few ways to keep bats in nature where they belong.
#1) Enlist Help from a Scare-Owl
Mount a fake, plastic owl as high as possible, somewhere on or near your roof. Bats want to roots in your attic, so making them think a predator is nearby can help.
Here's the catch: they'll eventually ignore a stationary "owl," so you'll have to move it once every season to ensure they stay afraid of it.
#2) Swap Exterior Lights
Bats eat bugs. So if you can attract fewer bugs, you can attract fewer bats, too.
Regular white outdoor bulbs will bring plenty of bugs. Yellow ones attract less.
Don't go with a bug zapper. The blue light draws the bugs in for zapping. That's great for killing yard mosquitoes, but anyone who has ever seen one can tell you they're coated in dead bugs. It's like advertising an all-you-can-eat bat-food buffet.
#3) Keep Egress Holes Plugged
A good half of the work that we do involves finding tiny egress holes and plugging them. Bats only need a hole that's ⅜" in diameter to squeeze through, so this can be a challenge.
You can stay on top of it by plugging any you happen to find yourself. Anybody can miss one, but there's no need to leave one that you've already located.
If you have a chimney, install stainless steel chimney caps with a wire mesh covering. The chimney serves as a sort of bat superhighway straight to your attic. Don't leave it open for them.
If you want to be absolutely sure you're getting them all, you can watch the house at dusk to see if bats are entering or exiting through any point on your home. If you realize you've got bats in your attic, though, it's time to call us.
Have You Already Lost the Bat Battle?
Just call us. The team at Elite Wildlife Services has expertise in finding every nook and cranny that bats use to enter a Texas home and heavy-duty bird netting that keeps them away.
We also know how to get bats out of your home humanely, safely, and in accordance with Texas law.
Why be driven batty when you can call us to schedule an inspection?
REQUEST A FREE INSPECTION
Our goal is to take time to evaluate each customers situation and customize proven results to solve it. If you are looking for a professional solution for your Bat Removal needs, please contact us today.
