Ted talks about bats

Kill the lights

One easy and often overlooked step is limiting unnecessary outdoor light sources.  Many Tennessee bat species are light-averse.  Bright porch lights, floodlights and landscaping accent lights can cause bats to avoid otherwise suitable feeding and roosting habitats because illumination increases the risk of being seen by predators. 

Midnight in the garden

The last thing I’ll mention is the coolest of all… create a night garden!  You can fill it with native, fragrant, pale-colored flowers that are pollinated by insects active from sundown to sunup.  Many of the insects bats eat, particularly moths, are drawn to native plants that bloom in the evening or produce a strong scent at dusk.  Great choices include: evening primrose, common milkweed, wild bergamot, flowering tobacco, native phlox species, and purple passionflower.  Not only will your garden look and smell beautiful, you will provide a rich bat buffet.

What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks.

― Douglas W. Tallamy, Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard