Harford Girl Scouts go to bat for these creatures of the night
People are often willing to do a good deed to help animals, but when a pair of Girl Scouts from Harford County considered ideas for a service project, they focused on creatures that don’t always engender warm and fuzzy feelings: bats.
Last week Sarah Kuehn and Lily Knudsen, both 14, installed a series of “bat boxes” at the historic Edgeley Grove Farm in Fallston to give the flying mammals a place to shelter and protect their young.
The project to organize, gather donations, build and install the boxes was done to attain Girl Scouting’s Silver Award — the highest achievement for a Girl Scout of the cadette rank.
But for Sarah and Lily, the service project was also done to help dispel common misconceptions about bats as creatures to be feared, and show support for a species that’s important to the farm ecology.
“Bats help with the environment in many ways, such as eating bugs — they’re also pollinators,” said Sarah. “They support the ecosystem,” added Lily. Both girls recently completed eighth grade at Fallston Middle School and will enter Fallston High School in September. They have been in Girl Scouts since kindergarten.
“They have to start brainstorming when they start middle school about an idea [for the Silver Award] that affects their community,” said Bonny Knudsen, Lily’s mother and troop leader of Fallston-based Troop 4047.
Last weekend she and her husband, Matt, helped the girls install a half-dozen bat boxes on the walls and under the eaves of agricultural buildings on the farm. The boxes have a wide, but narrow, opening at the bottom, so bats can enter, roost, absorb warmth from hours of sunlight and shelter from predators as they care for their young.
The farm is part of Edgeley Grove Park, a public space that includes Annie’s Playground, a climbing wall, the Fallston trailhead to the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail, athletic fields and working farm fields that are currently growing corn.
The girls chose Edgeley Grove because the farm buildings get a lot of sunshine, yet the location is secluded within the park so the bats don’t feel “crowded or threatened,” Sarah said.
“It’s still a public place, so people can come and see them,” Lily said.
The two know the park well. They said they used to play on Annie’s Playground — named for a local girl who died in 2003 when she was struck by a car in Baltimore — and still walk and ride bikes on the trails. Fallston-area Girl Scout troops, about 25 groups in all, have adopted Annie’s Playground and take turns cleaning and landscaping the grounds each month.
Completion of the bat project capped two years of work that consisted of research, meeting with officials from Harford County’s Department of Parks and Recreation, building the boxes with the help of another Girl Scout dad, Garner Leidy and completing paperwork needed to make the project official.
Matt Knudsen said when it came time to finish the project, Leidy helped the girls set up a “production line” to build the boxes.
“He provided all the tools and cut the wood and taught them how to use the tools to construct the houses,” Knudsen said.
The wood, painted a shade of green to blend with the barn walls, came from pallets donated by Home Depot.
Bonny Knudsen said the girls learned about bats and their habitat needs from staff at Eden Mill Nature Center in Pylesville. The project fueled the girls’ common interest in science.
“I like school and science, and I like helping the environment,” said Sarah, the daughter of Christopher and Kristin Kuehn.
Sarah and Lily said that as they share information about the project they hope to dispel myths about bats, such as concerns that they are dangerous because of the potential for rabies. In fact, only a small percentage carry the disease.
According to the National Park Service, bats’ ability to eat insects contributes more than $3.7 billion worth of pest control each year in the U.S. The park service notes that as bats eat insects, farmers don’t have to use as many pesticides.
“We hope people understand more about bats and their benefits, and they’re less afraid of them,” Lily said.