Abstract
THE problem of eliminating bats from church -steeples has puzzled many a churchwarden, and was responsible for the introduction to England of that unwelcome guest, the little owl. Solutions to that, and to the general problem of the roosting of bats in homes and occupied buildings, are offered by the United States Bureau of Biological Survey, in Leaflet 109 (Sept. 1935). The objection to the presence of bats is partly due to an aversion which many people feel towards them, but more substantially to the highly objectionable stench of the droppings and urine which collect where bats are roosting in numbers. There are two main lines of procedure in breaking up a bat-roost. The most satisfactory and the only permanent way is to make the building bat-proof by closing all entrances by strips of metal or wood or plugging them with rags (of course after the bats have left their roost in the evening). A good composition for larger openings is tarred hemp fibre such as is used for calking ships. The second method is sometimes simpler the use of a repellant such as naphthalene flakes, liberally distributed in and about the spaces occupied by the bats. A third method is the destruction of the bats by fumigation with, say, hydrocyanic acid generated from calcium cyanide; but the procedure is dangerous and demands handling by an expert, and it has the disadvantage of leaving the dead bodies of the bats to decompose and add to the odours of the roost.
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Bats in Belfries and Elsewhere. Nature 137, 427–428 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137427c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137427c0