Nocturnal Mammals - Bats

We continue our study of mammals this week.  Now we will talk about our nocturnal friends of the forests. In the Woodlands we have raccoon, opossum, and skunks that come out at night.  We also have bats that forage on insects all night.
Our focus is on the bats this week.  Even though they fly, bats have fur, produce milk, give birth to live young, and are warm-blooded so they are mammals.  They are very important to our ecosystem in Texas.  The 30 million bats in Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas can eat 250 tons of insects each summer night. One bat mother can eat about 4,500 insects alone.  Bats eat mosquitoes so they are very important to have in the Houston area. The Austin area bridge is famous for summer bats and even our Houston bridges downtown have summer time colonies.
We study how bats have special adaptations of nocturnal animals such as large eyes, good hearing, and a strong sense of smell. Bats use a special talent for traveling and finding their way in dark caves which is called echolocation; they emit high-pitched sound waves that bounce off objects and echo back to their own large ears.
We also made our own bat caves using paper mache.  We played  an echolocation game and also ate a delicious "fruit bat" snack.  A bat cave was set up in the room with glow in the dark bats for them to observe and enjoy.  We read books on bats and compared pictures of some of the 1,200 species of bats in our world.  Bats are fascinating and important creatures on our planet