Most people think of bats and get a creepy feeling. In reality, we should be thankful for bats and do everything to help preserve their habitat.

Here are some interesting facts about bats that you may not know.

- Bats smell, hear, taste and feel just like people do.
- The phrase “blind as a bat” isn’t true. Bats have good eyes for seeing in the daylight.
- Bats don’t have good night vision so they rely on the high-pitched squeaks they make called “ultrasounds”. We can’t hear those sounds, but the sound bounces back when it hits something and the bat can then tell where the object is.
- Some bats make the squeaks needed for echolocation with their mouths, but many send out sounds through their noses.
- Bats have the best hearing of all land mammals. They often have large ears compared to the rest of their body.
- Mother bats have one baby in their litter and the baby bat is called a “pup”.
- Baby bats don’t learn to fly until they are about 4 months old.
- Bats are very sociable mammals, and live in large quantities.
- Bats sleep upside down. They use their feet to grasp onto a twig or board. When it is cold they hang close together.
- People used to think bats were birds without feathers.
- Bats are warm blooded.
- Bats nurse their babies with milk.
- Bats have fur.
- Bats make up the order Chiroptera.
- Bat wings are made of 2 thin layers of skin stretched over the bats’ arm and fingers.
- Bats have a thumb and four fingers.
- Bats can wrap their wings around insects or fruit to hold it while they eat.
- There are close to 1000 different species of bats.
- A single brown bat can catch 600 mosquitoes in just one hour.
- Bats have teeth and chew their food.
- The 20 million Mexican free-tails from Bracken Cave, Texas, eat 250 tons of insects nightly.
- Tropical bats are key elements in the rain forest ecosystems, which rely on them to disperse seeds and to pollinate flowers.
- The world’s smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat of Thailand and weights less than a penny.
- Giant flying Fox bats live in Indonesia and have wingspans of nearly 6 feet.

At Nature Pavilion we admire bats and offer bat houses for our customers to hang, a real bat in a frame so you can see what a bat looks like up close, books and videos about bats and toy bats for children to play with. Education is the best way to save our bats.