bat signals

Learn how to make your backyard a bat paradise by exploring BCI’s content on bat gardens and bat houses.

Check out these pages for tips on fine-tuning your garden for bats, like planting native vegetation, adding roosting habitat, and incorporating vegetation that draws in a variety of insects to create a bat smorgasbord. The Bat Gardens page also features bat-enticing plant lists for a number of regions, including parts of California, Colorado, Kentucky, Oregon, and Texas.

It can be a challenge to get bat houses right, so BCI recently updated the Bat Houses page to include detailed information on construction, placement, and maintenance, as well as tips on safety principles to protect bats from dangers like overheating, predators, and other hazards. The page also explores bat houses around the world, from Australia to China to Ghana.

BCI’s Chief Scientist Winifred Frick, Ph.D., and Director of Conservation Evidence Teague O’Mara, Ph.D., have teamed up to create an illustrated guide to bats. Bats of the World: A Guide to Every Family describes all 21 recognized families of bats around the world and features profiles of selected species, from carnivores to nectar feeders, as well as the conservation threats each species faces. The guide, published by Princeton University Press, includes photos, infographics, and more for species ranging from the tiny, 2-gram bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) to the giant 2-pound golden-crowned flying fox (Acerodon jubatus).

In January 2026, conservation legend J. David Bamberger passed away at the age of 97. Bamberger served on BCI’s Board of Directors and was instrumental in securing the original five acres for Bracken Cave. He worked with the family that previously owned Bracken Cave to arrange for BCI to purchase it and paid to build trails and infrastructure to make the property accessible to visitors.

Bamberger worked his way up from being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman to a founder and CEO of Church’s Fried Chicken. As the company’s largest shareholder, he invested his earnings in conservation projects. Inspired by Louis Bromfield’s book Pleasant Valley, Bamberger sought out parcels of land that were in need of restoration. In 1969, he purchased 3,000 acres in Blanco County, Texas, and eventually expanded the property to encompass 5,500 acres, naming it Selah (“pause and reflect”), Bamberger Ranch Preserve. There, he spent decades restoring the land and instilling ethical land stewardship principles in visitors. He also created the Chiroptorium, an artificial bat cave that is now home to hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis). Bamberger’s conservation legacy lives on at Selah.