Two years ago, when the farmer chopped down all the evergreen trees on the slope above our garden, he inadvertently removed nearly all the suitable locations for birds to nest. I never thought of it until this week, when I saw that at a height of about ten feet (3m.) above the ground someone’s been nailing bijou avian mud huts to the remaining birch trunks.
I started to notice them one afternoon while I was going for a walk with the dogs and goats. At first I thought they must be someone’s art project (there’s a lot of that sort of thing around here), but bird houses make more sense. I must have seen at least fifty of them, maybe there are lots more.
Mounted on almost every remaining tree there are four different shapes that comprise what I assume to be four different housing types to accommodate the habits of different species. This one below is kind of interesting because, unless they are expecting the birds to unscrew the hooks on either side with their beaks, there’s no visible entry. To scare away small children (or perhaps to attract their interest, it’s all guesswork) the front panel has a Hallowe’en-type imprint, the owl as predator, and there are some slats from a bamboo blind hanging underneath, probably to sharpen claws and beaks. None of the owls I’ve seen around here would fit in this box; it’s not much bigger than a jumbo box of cornflakes.
This one below has a tiny slit, like a letterbox, that my wife says is the entry. She says they make it that small so that squirrels can’t get in – I don’t know how she knows this kind of thing – so maybe someone ought to be making houses for the squirrels too. Empty says that red squirrels can’t remember where they’ve left their hoards of nuts, so maybe they also forget where they live, lose their keys etc., “forget” to pay the rent.
I think the houses are made out of potters’ clay that has been rolled out flat like pastry and then shaped and fired. That means they won’t rot, but they might get a bit cold without some straw inside; I suppose it’s up to the birds to provide that sort of thing. The houses all have a yellow number on the side as if someone’s expecting the post office to deliver the mail.
Good luck with that, the postman won’t come up to our house.
Update: These are homes for bats not birds. See rr’s comment & link, below.
A Bad Guide 
I think on the second structure down (third picture down) it’s not an owl, it’s a bat, therefore making it a bat box. Bats eat mosquitoes and midges and therefore to my way of thinking are much to be prized.
(sorry, forgot the )
You’re right, it’s a bat. Thank you so much for the link, they must all be different shaped bat boxes! Fantastic. I’ll amend my post. I love bats too, partly because they kill midges, of which there are many here at times, but partly because I just like them. So where do bats usually live during the winter, church belfries? I see them flying around in the garden at dusk, but only in the warmer part of the year. Are they going to overwinter in the boxes? Will they come out at all in the winter? I’ll watch out for bat droppings.
rr, thanks for dropping by. I’d been looking for your blog but couldn’t find it. I ought to have had it on the blogroll, I’ll put it on right now…
I didn’t know that. In fact I’ve never heard of a bat licence. What do you have to do, hang upside down and pass exams in echo location and blood sucking?
“You’ll feel a slight stick but don’t worry, I’m a licensed bat.”
If they’re for breeding bats, would that make them battery cages?
An unlicenced bat will be prosecuted for unlawful battery. (No-one wants battery to go uncharged.)
…The punsters come out at midnight.
Illegal to disturb them while roosting. Does that mean that if you find one sleeping in your house you are supposed to tiptoe around so as not to wake it?
Bats get into our house occasionally–I don’t know how. The last time it happened, I tried opening a door in the hopes that the bat that was swooping back and forth in the long front room would find its way out. Incredibly, a second one flew in instead.
I do like them, but they’re a little scary up close.
I’m just as curious as you are about the species of human that puts up these housing units, even taking the trouble to provide p.o. boxes. You could set up appropriate housing to attract and so identify them – say a lean-to with a comfy folding chair, a hot-water kettle and plenty of green tea, and a pair of field glasses.
Depending on how much you’re willing to spend on this field project, you might equip the lean-to with one of those little cameras that are timed to take a picture every 15 seconds when triggered by a movement sensor. To save money, though, you could just leave the chair folded and dust it lightly with talcum powder, so fingerprints will be recorded when the chair is opened up.
Even if you install a camera, this will not suffice to discriminate artists from animal-lovers. To do that you would need to include something like a parrot in a cage. An animal lover will release the parrot, an artist will sign the cage.
Sorry, I meant to say a plastic parrot.
Sorry, I meant to say a plastic parrot.
I’ve heard that excuse a few times.
But I will get to the bottom of who has set up fifty-or-more bat homes outside my front door. Supposing the goats had been allergic to bats? And as Ø says, what happens if I inadvertently wake one up by dropping my front-door keys, do I go to prison?
Incredibly, a second one flew in instead.
Don’t forget they’re as blind as a bat. Unlike humans they base their decisions on sonar, not on our welcoming facial expressions.
It’s a punning clan… Can you feed plastic parrots on clastic carrots? Do you find clastic carrots corny?
The split between P and Q Celts can be traced back to a fight over access to a public urinal.
The P Pelts would soon exploit their privileged position to produce tanned hides.
Urinal? Urea? A cunning plan that’s mostly going way over my head…
Interesting! How many neighbours do you have around your house?
I cannot imagine it would be so difficult to find out who put those nests.
You can say that there are people from around all the world wanting to know the motives, reasons and purposes of this project…
(How could you mistake an icon of a bat with one of an owl? I’m very disappointed with you!)
How could you mistake an icon of a bat with one of an owl?
Pathetic, isn’t it? I’m not a licensed blogger, you know.
How many neighbours do you have around your house?
I cannot imagine it would be so difficult to find out…
I’m pretty sure it’s not the neighbours. We have about five, and they would have told us what was going on. It’s a big project making all those bat houses, it may be a group from Oslo University or something like that. It may be Batman, trying to make a point.
Of course Batman it’s the most plausible explanation.
Batman building for Robin, I suppose.
Almost midnight again.
It took us a while to work out what sort of creatures these houses were meant to attract. Meanwhile I’d been hoping that this thread would attract Trond. But the P and Q joke is over my head, as is pretty much anything about bat urine.
Here is a larger bat house designed by two architects, one of whom is from Oslo.
Explaining jokes hardly ever improves them, but still…Here are the Celtic jokes, explained:
The p/c alternation of the carrot joke, and maybe the clan reference, made me think of Celts.
It occured to me that a capacity problem at a urinal might explain the split of the Celts into pee Celts and queue Celts.
Later I came to think that the P Celts ought to be be Pelts. Tanned hides are pee pelts.
(Now I think maybe I’ve used the P/Q joke before, and it just reoccured to me.)
Tanned hides are pee pelts.
Makes sense, though I can’t get any google hits for the term.
Do bats urinate? I’m going to make everyone explain their jokes from now on, there’s info here.
Ø, I’m very interested by that huge bathouse. We ought to have one by our lake. I wish I could blow up their exploded diagram that shows the interior, it seems to be scaled completely differently to our little bathouses but maybe they were expecting bigger bats. I may have to give them a call.
“Bat piss” occurs in a Python routine.
It’s good to have the subtitles. Denevér-pisi may be bat piss in Czech, but it may not. It’s hard to czech.
I’m going to make everyone explain their jokes from now on, there’s info here.
You might want to reconsider that after I tell the ones about the Sami fetishists and the Frenchman with the beardless smile. I think there’s an Italian joke about backbones in there too.
(These were all erased from the Robin comment.)
“Leather Lapps”, is apparently the Swedish name for their bats. Haha, I wonder why. It says small bats sometimes sleep inside flowers.
Beardless or bald? I don’t know much Italian. Erased?
Can anyone explain why Google Translate English–>French gives
bat –> MTD
?
(I think there is something called by the acronym BAT that is confusing the matter.)
Also, what does the Fleder in Fledermaus mean? It sounds like a leathery wing, doesn’t it?
And murcielago: Is mur mouse? Is ciel sky? Or what?
Ein Flederwisch is a feather duster, according to my dictionary. Fleddern with two Ds is to rummage (ferret) through, it doesn’t look like there’s much of a connection. So probably Fleder– is somehow related to feather even though eine Feder is actually a feather. I’ve always thought of it as flying mouse for some reason, even though I knew that fliegende is flying. It now occurs to me that I’ve always mixed up in my mind Die Fledermaus with Der fliegende Holländer, The Flying Dutchman as I usually think of it.
Murcielago – I thought you meant the Lamborghini. So it’s the batmobile, didn’t know that.
It doesn’t look like…probably…somehow related…etc. are in lieu of Stu and Bruessel, who are no doubt at work.
Which is the question about “murciélago” ? Its etymology?
You know it means “bat” in Spanish.
The word came from Latin. Mur = mus, muris ‘mouse’. And caeculus = ‘little blind’.
Why do the Romans didn’t say anything about their wings? It seems more important to me than if they’re blind or not.
Thanks Julia, yes that was Ø’s question. I read on one of the Wikipedia bat sites that bats aren’t really blind at all.
German fledern is a verb related to Norwegian flagre and English flapper, all variations on a theme.
Swedish läderlapp means “leatherpatch”. You’re right that the French word chauve means “bald”, but in the context of a Frenchman’s mouth I thought it might mean “shaved” (not very good, but, in my defence, it didn’t pass my original round of self-censorship).The Italian joke is on the words chirottero “bat” and chiroterapia “massage”, but I don’t know enough Italian to craft it.
(On a more serious note: I was going to add Italian Wikipedia links to this, but between I looked them up on my mobile and I picked up my laptop to write this reply, my links were redirected to this.)
Between “bald mouse”, “little blind mouse”, “flapmouse”, “handfinger”, “leatherpatch”, and “bat”, I believe my favorite is “leatherpatch”.
“-wing”, not “-finger”–I think I need a sports setting, too.
Trond, I did not understand “the Frenchman with the beardless smile” until you explained it. It IS far-fetched! Chauve-souris means literally “bald mouse” as you say, a strange description as bats are not more or less bald than mice, but that description has been around since the Late Roman Empire..
There is no way that chauve can mean ‘beardless’, which would be imberbe if ‘too young to have a beard’, or glabre ‘clean-shaven’ (both rather liberary words, unlike chauve). Souris means ‘mouse’. It is also a very old version of sourire ‘(to) smile’, or another form of the same verb, but it had never occurred to me to think of a bald smile. Presumably you could interpret chauve-souris as Chauve! Souris! ‘Baldy! Smile!’ if you were taking a picture of a bald man, but that would be stretching it.
As to whether bats urinate – surely they must. But one might hope not while hanging upsidedown.
What about “pipistrelle”? Is it an allusion to – ahem – weeing?
A catalan bat is a rat-penat. I believe that means a hanging rat.
I see nothing wrong with peeing upside-down, especially in the case of bats. The urea would help keep their flight membranes supple. Since I don’t fly, I’m content to stand and deliver.
I was on holiday in France, away from all computers. According to Duden, the word “Fleder” in “Fledermaus” is related to “flattern” = flutter, flit, beat one’s wings (like Trond said).
LILLY, Pa. — Thirty-five windmills at a western Pennsylvania wind farm have been silenced at night since a bat that belongs to an endangered species was found dead under one of the turbines.
Catanea: la pipistrelle (a small bat seen at nightfall)
The Classical Latin word for ‘bat’ was vespertilio(nis), formed on the basis of vesper ‘evening’. This word evolved into Italian vipistrello (Dante), later pipistrello (Boccaccio), borrowed into French as pipistrelle. I don’t know whether the change from vipi- to pipi- has anything to do with the familiar word pipi, but I would guess not.
In passing from Italian to French, the word became feminine, perhaps because the normal French word for ‘bat’, chauve-souris, was feminine.
At the time of the Late Roman Empire, spoken Latin had become quite different from the Classical Latin of the Republic, which was still the language of education. There were lists of words of the type “don’t say X, say Y”, and the best-known one lists vespertiliones as the correct term for ‘bats’, instead of the popular, uneducated calvas sorices, literally ‘bald mice’. In almost every one of these cases, it is the popular word that has made it into the modern descendants of Latin such as Italian, French, Spanish, and others less well-known.
m-l, that’s very interesting. Thank you all.