For many years I have noticed bats hanging from the undersides of fan palm leaves. I snagged a shot of this one today with my cell phone hanging out on a lower leaf. Anyone know the species?
How cool, only bat I've ever seen was a small brown one, like so small I thought it was a huge roach at first. I know nothing about bats except they eat a lot of mosquitoes.
Name: Gina Florida (Zone 9a) Tropical plant collector 40 years
Gainesville has the large colonies of Mexican Freetail Bats in the bat houses up at UF but I am sure there are other bats around the state too. We see them every night here, because we live in the woods, they come out at dusk and start swooping everywhere eating mosquitoes
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We also have them here. Its wooded and theres a small river channel behind us. I always see them in the evenings catching bugs and mosquitos.I havent found where they sleep yet. Must be out in the woods somewhere.
We here them flying over all the time, but the other night a little one was flying around us sitting outside under our pavilion, was kind of cool, but I have long hair, heard stories about them getting in your hair, so I went inside.
I had one last year that the fan got, it was so little and cute. I make sure to have porch fans off at night, I had been leaving them on for the orchids. Depending who they are, and their interest...we take company over to UF and watch them swarm into their house. Some people give you the
EWWW thing. They are really cool and unmatched natural mosquito control.
A typical colony of Mexican free-tailed bats numbers between 50 and 20,000 bats. Each bat will eat between 500 and 1000 insects in a single night....this off the UF web site.
so excitied, saw bats for the first time flying over the garage last night, they were flying in circles, I read this is how they round up insects, kinda like dolphins do with fish. I sure hope they stick around until summer.
