Around Halloween pictures of bats are everywhere, usually in scary scenes along with witches and ghosts. However, there’s nothing truly scary about bats. In fact if you don’t like getting mosquito bites in the summer bats are good friends to have around. One bat can eat 500 mosquitoes in an hour! Bats usually like to live near streams, ponds or lakes because insects like mayflies, caddis flies, midges and mosquitoes are found in large numbers around open water.

Though bats can see, they rely more on some very cool built-in technology called echolocation. They will make a sound that is so high pitched that a human cannot hear it. They do this from a few to 200 times a second. These sounds bounce off other objects and come back to the bat as echoes. This helps the bat to avoid hitting objects while it is flying in the dark. Echolocation also helps the bat locate the insects it wants to eat.

During the summer female bats and their young live in colonies of a few to 1,000 bats, usually in warm, dark places like attics. Male bats are normally alone during the summer and may live under shingles, behind shutters or inside loose tree bark. Often during the winter, bats will travel to slightly warmer climates where the temperature will stay above freezing, and they will hibernate in groups of hundreds or thousands in caves or mines.