House Guest

This is one of our kitchen/dinning room windows.

This is one of our fake window shutters,

purely for decoration purposes only, or so I thought!

Here is the tiny little crack between the cement board siding and the shutters. 

This isn't just a tiny little crack, this is a condo. 

A condo?  For what?  For our friendly neighborhood bug catchers, bats!  I have always wanted to make a few bat houses around the homestead, but haven't gotten around to it.  I knew we had some local residence because early in the morning when I would go out the front door and head to the coop, these little guys would be flying around the light outside the front door catching bugs.  I have always enjoyed watching bats fly. 

It wasn't until just this week that I discovered this nice little condo.  I was in our sunroom with the windows open and heard a bunch of squeeking.  I tracked down that sound to behind the shutter and low and behold I could just barly see him/her moving around back there.  Cool - just so they don't move into the actual house, they can live behind the shutters all they want.

Wisconsin is home to 8 different species of bats.  Three are solitary most of the year and then migrate south for the winter.  "Snowbirds".  The other 5 species form colonies and will hibernate here over the winter.  Now I can't tell you forsure which species has become out House Shutter Guest as I haven't gotten a good look at it yet, but I am guessing it is a Little Brown Bat as they are very common in Northern Wisconsin.  If I do get a good look and I can tell which one it realy is, I'll be sure to update.  Until then, I will just enjoy knowing our little bats will continue to eat mosquitoes and other bugs for us.  They are so great.