wildlife

Bat visiting Woodley Park last year

Urban Wilds is written by Lela S. Lela lives in Petworth. She previously wrote about Tulip Trees.

I adore bats and have been thinking about how to coax more of them into our neighborhood. Growing up in the country, bats were a staple of summer evenings, but these days I rarely see them, particularly within city limits. As many as ten species of bats can actually be found in the DC area throughout the year, although several are migratory types, not permanent residents. Several of our species (including tricolored, little brown, and big brown bats) are being decimated nationally by white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that is estimated to have killed over 6 million bats in North America.

As bat populations decline, we’re left instead with more insects that munch on us and on our crops (including that tomato plant on your porch). Most famous for their taste for mosquitoes – a single bat can eat hundreds of them in a night – they also eat prodigious amounts of other pest insects, including June bugs, Japanese beetles, stink bugs, and cucumber beetles, as well as moths and other pollinating insects. And all that aside, they’re just so freaking cute.

How to bring more bats into your life

In the mid-Atlantic, bats aren’t pollinators themselves, although they do play that role in other parts of the countries. But you can attract them by planting flowers that nocturnal insects enjoy. Try night- or evening-blooming flowering plants, like evening primrose, marsh phlox, moonflowers, four o’clocks, plaintain lily (a kind of hosta), and night gladiolus. Herb gardens with stand-bys like basil and mint are also good.

If you have a pond or stream near your house, bats can use it as a drinking source and will also hunt for insects around to the water.

Finally, if you have the space for it you can install a bat house. I always loved this idea, but we are chronic renters and have yet to find a landlord amenable to adding a bat hotel to the back yard. Bat Conservation International’s guidelines on bat houses suggest the structures be at least two feet tall – much bigger than the ones I’ve seen for sale. Have any readers installed a bat house and had anyone take up residence?

Finally – a quick word on rabies. Your chances of being bitten by a rabid bat are extremely slim, though it does happen. The DC Department of Health has guidelines on dealing with a possible rabies exposure here. Minimize your chances of exposure by never handling a bat directly, even if it appears healthy.

Urban Wilds is written by Lela S. Lela lives in Petworth. She previously wrote about bird migration.

Vultures!

I’m writing this post from Florida City, just outside the Everglades, where vultures have developed a taste for windshield rubber. Like New Zealand’s infamous kea, migratory black vultures stopping over near the park are known for their attacks on rubber and plastic parts of cars, ripping out window seals and peeling windshield wipers. It’s gotten so bad that the park offers visitors tarps to shield their car from attacks. We don’t know why the vultures do it especially since they don’t really seem to eat the stuff, just shred it. Maybe just for fun, or perhaps the delicious flavor of sun-warmed vinyl.

DC has plenty of these scavengers – both black vultures and turkey vultures – although in our area, at least, they haven’t turned to gnawing cars yet. Vultures don’t have syrinxes, the bird equivalent of vocal cords, so they don’t sing and limit their vocalizations to hisses and grunts. Both species in our area soar on thermals looking and smelling for lunch. (Black vultures have much poorer senses of smell, and often watch for turkey vultures to identify carrion so they can sail in and steal it. Vultures thrive around cities as well as in the country. In fact, the urban heat island effect generates strong, consistent thermal columns for them to ride, which other soaring birds like red-tailed hawks also benefit from. To tell our two species of vulture apart, look at the way a given bird is flying. Turkey vultures wobble in flight, where black vultures have a stronger, more forceful flight pattern punctuated by several wing beats. Black vultures have tails that look short for the birds’ size, and the underside of their wings appear almost totally black; turkey vultures’ wings are marked by a long stripe of paler feathers toward the outer edge. They’re found all over the DC region, throughout the year.