Welcome to my Girl Scout Gold Award project website, dedicated to building longer-lasting and more sustainable bat houses. This website aims to help protect these essential creatures from environmental threats and predators, but it also seeks to raise awareness about their critical role in our ecosystem. The alarming fact that more than half of the bat species in the United States are in severe decline or listed as endangered, as reported by Nature.org, underscores the urgency of this project.
Five years ago, I built ten bat houses in partnership with the National Park Service that were donated to Title 1 low-income schools throughout Fulton County, Georgia, as part of my Girl Scout Silver Award project. These initial bat houses served as teaching tools so students could better learn about bat species, their habits, and their importance in the ecosystem in reducing the need for chemical pesticides. For these first bat houses, I went with the standard recommended wood and methods to build them. When I built an extra one for my home, I recognized that the bat house degraded over time despite painting them and caulking the wood seams.
Motivated by a deep personal commitment to animal conservation and the Girl Scout principles of leadership and environmental stewardship, this project takes the lessons learned and seeks to address the failure modes from the initial bat houses I built five years ago. This website provides detailed step-by-step assembly plans and methods to help develop longer-lasting and more sustainable bat houses that can be shared with other students and Girl Scouts to benefit from my lessons learned. This will result in more sustainable bat houses that last longer and protect these essential creatures.
