Stein

iTrader: (46)

Met a new friend today. His name is Henry. I know that there are a bunch more around but this is the first that I have seen. He was chillin' behind one of the window shutters.

I'm planning to build a bat house and mount it up on one of the trees. They eat on average 7,000 mosquitoes a night so they are nice to have around.

94mx5red

iTrader: (14)

Very, very cool.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

I am curious do you have a ball to talk to just yet? If not you need one by the front door :P (as a joke to visitors or for those lonely nights)

Stein

iTrader: (46)

This one took me a while. Then it occurred to me. Wilson.

chpmnsws6

iTrader: (12)

I still need to build that bat house.

Stein

iTrader: (46)

I was just looking at plans. They are super duper easy. They look claustrophobic to me.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

When I was in school at UF, there was a largish bat house near one of the lakes on the outskirts of the campus. The only problem I ever saw with it was that, in addition to bats, it tended to attract hippies.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

we have a bat house. not sure if we have any residents yet. i've seen a few bats flying around our house but not sure they live in it.

that bat house in joe's picture would make a great auto-fertilizer for a garden bed below it.

viperormiata

iTrader: (24)

I would gladly donate money for epic MT drunken island party

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

My recollection here is hazy, but I believe that IFAS does collect the guano.

I was doing a bit more reading, and apparently a lot has happened to that bat house since I left.

First, the university wanted to relocate it so that they could build a new dormatory on that location. But remember how I said that bathouses attracted hippies? Well, the hippies fought hard to keep the bathouse where it is (claiming that moving it would disturb the bats) so the university wound up nixing the dormatory. Sorry, freshmen. You'll have to keep on getting crammed three-to-a-room into dorm rooms originally designed to house two students. (The so-called "temporary triples". Apparently "temporary" means greater than 20 years, as they've been doing this since before I was there.)


Then, a few years ago, the floor of the bathouse collapsed and fell out. Apparently the weight of an estimated 250,000 bats was too much for it.



Rather than taking this opportunity to move the bathouse, they not only rebuilt it in-situ, but they also constructed a second, larger bathouse next to it, called the bat barn. The barn has a 400,000 bat capacity.




So UF now has the capacity to house well over half a million bats, but fewer than 10,000 undergrads. I have to wonder how much the bats are paying in tuition.

Handy Man

Haha! Glad to see another UF grad here. I was there when the floor fell out of the old house... the hippies where loosing their ---- about how many bats must have died

It was pretty cool to stop by at sunset and watch the things swarm out of the house. It was like something out of a Hitchcock film.

rmcelwee

iTrader: (1)

We found a rather large bat house the day we purchased our MSM (I think it was in Key West):

viperormiata

iTrader: (24)

Haha, small world. I was just at that place a few weeks ago. It's in the keys, but not Key West.

edit: hold on, did you buy that MSM in Key West???

Stein

iTrader: (46)

Current update. Things are greening up nicely. I needed to mow but was on my way to the airport so no time. Friday I'll be out. Scored a nice Honda rear bagger mower with two speed self-propel for $50 on CL that I can leave out there. Starts first pull.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

what are these groundcover plants?

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They look low maintenance.

Stein

iTrader: (46)

They are lillies. They are about ready to bloom. Orange blossoms about 3" across. They are zero maintenance, as in they looked like that and nobody had touched them in 15-20 years. I haven't done anything but transplant some. They need to be thinned. I could ship you some. They are like a bulb and would ship fine.

Stein

iTrader: (46)

bump

Went out for a bit today, things are looking good.

Cheekanuble

iTrader: (4)

in for more interior design pictures for reasons.