Blackburn College Bat Program

Coming soon…. The bats are back 🦇

In Illinois, as the weather is warming up, bats will begin to come out of hibernation. Be aware of the signs of bats coming out of home roosts. Fluttering sounds and high-pitched squeaking sounds may be heard within the walls of your house.

Bats will be on the hunt for food as they come out of their hibernation due to only surviving on their food reserves for most of the winter. Bats will then begin choosing their summer roosts, this may include caves, trees, or buildings.

For our celebration 🌳 we had a special delivery this morning from Douglas Designs. Our new Blackburn Bat Program Awareness Signs. These signs will serve as information tools to the public about our research-based bat houses on campus. Including a few rules like, limited noise around bat houses, no movement of the bat houses, and to leave any bats that may be grounded alone. But, this will allow people to know almost exactly where are bat houses are. So keep a lookout on campus for these new signs and don’t forget to look up!

Stoddard Bat House 3/28/22

"We want to thank everyone that has been apart of this process. The Stoddard Bat House will serve as another research tool for our program and others around the state." - Blackburn Bat Program Coordinator, Lexi Hoffman

On 3/28/22, the Blackburn College Bat Program and Grounds Supervisor, Nick McKorkle, constructed our new bat house at Stoddard. After a few months of research our program is hopeful to have this bat house location serve as our Live Feed location that will be finalized in the future. What is special about this bat house is that it is a double-sided bat house, meaning that there are two separate bat houses connected to one pole. This serves as temperature control for our bats, if one side gets 'too warm' for the bats then they can switch to the other bat house that is not directly facing the sun. In total, our bat house will be able to house 170 bats which is about 85 bats per bat house.

Adding another bat house to our college campus will provide awareness for not only our students, but our staff, faculty, community members, and alumni. Thank you all for your support in our program, to learn more visit our website at www.blackburnbatprogram.wordpress.com

Thanks again to BatBnB and Nick for allowing this opportunity to happen!

We want to thank everyone who attended the ‘Let’s Talk About Bats’ Presentation last Wednesday. We also want to thank Bee City Carlinville for sponsoring the event and allowing this to happen.

We had a great time at the presentation with lots of interest (27 people in attendance) and questions. Questions that were unable to be answered will be posted on later posts, so keep an eye out for those. If you were unable to make the event or watch the Facebook Live, a recording is available on our page!

Also, congratulations to the two lucky winners of the bat house giveaways. If you were interested in putting up a bat house at the presentation, message us through our Facebook and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

And don’t forget to lookout for pictures from the event coming soon!