🦇Little Animals, Great Impact🦇

🦇 Happy Bat Appreciation Week🦇

🌿 Smart Yards Co-op observes this week, October 24th to October 31st, in appreciation for these little animals with great impact.

Bat Week is an international annual celebration designed to raise awareness about the need for bat conservation and the role of bats in nature. Smart Yards Co-op, was founded on October 2015 with the ethics of Permaculture: planet care, people care & fair share. Also to celebrate and to share this type of awareness.

Did you know that bats contribute with critical services for our ecosystem? Here we list three important ecological functions that they provide:

✨Pollination: Like hummingbirds🐦, 🌱Seed dispersal: They travel long bees🐝, and butterflies🦋, which distances and defecate while Smart Yards Co-op's garden thrive they fly, thereby dispersing the with, bats are also important fruit’s seeds along their way. pollinators.

(Seeds dropped by bats can account for up to 95% of the first new growth in those areas.)

🦟Pest Control: By eating up to 1,200 mosquitos per hour, bats help keep pest populations in check.

(Recent studies estimate that bats eat enough pests to save more than $3.7 billion per year in crop damage and pesticide costs.)

Unfortunately, there are 23 species of bat currently listed as critically endangered because of disruption of forests, over-harvesting of trees, climate change and disease. This means that many of them face immediate risk of extinction. These are some of the reasons why at Smart Yards Co-op we take their habitat into account when designing and building our gardens.

Most bats are nocturnal, they fly and forage for their food/bugs at night, which gives us the opportunity to provide them with safe places to sleep during the day. This is an example of the type of homes that Smart Yards Co-opcreates for bats so they can thrive in our urban gardens and at the same time they continue with their role in the web of life. We encourage you to let the professionals take care of your garden in order to create an ecosystem where our native flora and fauna, including bats, is supported.

"The bat who cannot grow a feather, contrives to fly on wings of leather."
― Arthur Guiterman