One way of encouraging a wild animal to leave the space you don't want them to inhabit, is to give them a space that they CAN inhabit. With bats, this comes in the form of a bat box.



What is a bat box?
The name gives the game away, really; a bat box is a box that you install somewhere on your property, to ensure that bats have a home to go to that isn't your attic. It's not an approach that works for every property, but can work, both as a long-term and short-term effort. You CANNOT install a bat box on the building that you are trying to evict bats from. If the bats live in your attic, for example, you can't put a bat box on the outside of the roof, just a few feet from the attic entrance point. This will not work to move the bats from one space to another, but will instead just give them a slightly larger roost. Some might use the box, but the majority of them will prefer to stay in the safety of the attic roost.

Bat boxes must be installed as far away from your property as possible. If you don't have a garden, or a large enough garden, using a box isn't an option for the reason we mentioned above. You must also make sure that you don't install a bat box somewhere that would then encourage the colony to move into another property, such as your neighbor's attic. Your neighbor would have the right to complain and ask you to move the box, and could even take legal action to get the outcome they want. There are a number of issues with bat boxes, making them a great removal approach only in very specific circumstances. The box needs to be far enough away from your house to ensure the bats aren't still hanging around, making it only suitable for properties with enough land surrounding the building, or with a long/large back garden. You can't put the box at the end of the garden if that spot is close to someone else's building/property/will cause problems for someone else. You must also make sure that the box is big enough to accommodate the entire colony. If you don't know the extent of the attic problem, you can't ensure that you buy or build a box big enough.

Finally, moving bats in certain states (and with specific species) could be unlawful. It is definitely illegal to kill bats or use any form of lethal force to encourage their eviction. Each bat removal job must be dealt with in a specific and unique way. The job that your neighbor was faced with won't be the same as yours. The way that he or she dealt with the situation won't work for you. Just because someone else had great success with a bat box on the internet, doesn't mean that you will too. In fact, bat boxes are just as likely to fail as using repellents or other non-exclusion methods of bat removal.

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