Athens-Clarke's Best Bat Removal

Will a Bat House Stop Bats Going in my Attic?

There are many ways to get rid of bats from within an attic, and using a bat house is one of those ways. It isn't something that will work alone — bats aren't going to use the bat house just because you have put it there — but instead provides a backup home for them, should they be left unable to find somewhere of their own.

Using a bat house will not:

- Encourage currently present bats to leave your attic or building space

- Prevent future bats (and other wild critters) from getting inside your attic

- Deal with the young bats that cannot be left inside the attic

- Clean up after the animals, particularly the dangerous and occasionally disease-ridden guano

Using a bat house will:

- Offer bats an alternative roosting spot when you have kicked them out of the one they have chosen

- Ensures a humane and safe outcome for an entire colony of bats, providing the right exclusion devices or funnels are used at the same time

- Enable you to do your bit for the local environment because bats are delicate creatures that we actually cannot live without (say goodbye to bats and you can say goodbye to tequila, too!)

By building a bat house or box somewhere else in your garden, you are essentially building your children a home, but not telling them about it or giving them a key to the front door. It's a pointless act. After the bat box or house is in place, you must work to enable those bats to find the alternative home and it's not like you can just offer them up a key. To start with, any bat will just fly right in the opposite direction if you dare to get too close. Secondly: bats are associated with almost as many diseases as some rodents. They're not a creature you're going to want to get too close to, nor are they are a creature that you would want living right by your back door.

When you use a box or house to get rid of bats from your attic, you need to make sure that you are following some pretty strict guidelines to ensure the entire job is done properly. This means sealing up the building so that no more bats (or other pests) can get into your home, and making sure that there aren't other areas that could become potential damage zones or holes/crevices/cracks.

You can't seal up the building until you have evicted all bats, however, and you can only do this towards the end of summer/fall. If you try to move bats in the spring or early to mid summer, you're running the risk of moving mothers without babies, resulting in the babies' inevitable death.

Bat removal isn't recommended as a DIY weekend job, and it certainly won't be resolved with the addition of a bat box or house alone. There are other things to take into consideration when dealing with bat boxes too, such as disposing of the guano safely (disease threats), making sure that other predators aren't lured into your garden by the bats, and ensuring that potential rabies vectors (which bats are) cannot get too close to your kids or pets. You can't build a box too close to the space in which you are trying to evict them from, either, so you can only really take this action if you have a big enough piece of land to play with.

Will bat boxes get bats out of the attic? More than likely not, but it's a nice thing to do in certain situations only.