Advocate: Bats can take bite out of mosquito population
Defense backs proposal for east Orange bat houses
Shari Blissett-Clark made her case for bat houses in east Orange County, accompanied by relatives of future tenants.
The president of the Florida Bat Conservancy on Tuesday carried two rescue bats in a “critter carrier” through security and into the Orange County Administration Building to show they aren’t mean or nasty and might help keep the county’s mosquito population in check.
She defended County Commissioner Emily Bonilla’s controversial proposal to erect bat houses as a mosquito-control strategy.
Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs
would like to drive a stake through the heart of the idea. She fears bringing bats to Bithlo and other east Orange communities could put people at risk of rabies.
“I think bats are an important part of our ecosystem, but I think we also have to recognize they do spread rabies,” Jacobs said after the commission meeting.
Bonilla agreed to separate her effort from the county’s mosquito-control division but planned to move ahead on her own, despite the mayor’s warning of potential human risk.
“It’s not that much of a risk,” she said.
Bonilla said studies have shown less than 1 percent of bats have been found to carry rabies and her office has received more than a dozen emails or calls from constituents who’d like a bat house on their property.
On her Facebook page she wrote, “A person has a better chance of winning the state lottery jackpot than catching rabies from a bat as the statistics of the number of humans in the United States dying of rabies from bats are 1-2 a year.”
Bonilla did not disclose possible locations for the bat houses.
Bat houses are rectangular boxes, typically made of wood, that have an open bottom and an envelopelike opening at the top. The inside has chambers or cells for bats to roost, and the boxes are mounted on poles or trees.
Blissett-Clark said her nonprofit group has built more than 600 bat houses in Florida — near schools, parks and playgrounds — without a single instance of human/ bat conflict.
No case of human rabies has been reported in an Orange resident since 2008, when the county began keeping an electronic rabies database, said Kent Donahue, spokesman for Florida Department of Health in Orange County.
Department epidemiology records show 14 instances in which a quarantined bat tested positive for rabies, putting the flying mammals second to raccoons, 31 of which tested positive.
“You know what? You can thank Hollywood and popular literature for most of what you think you know about bats,” Blissett-Clark said. “The truth is bats are shy, gentle animals that prefer to hide from their predators so interactions with people are rare.”
But Jacobs said bats are the leading cause of human beings contracting rabies in the U.S. and the secondleading cause of the disease in Florida.
She said she also can’t forget the tragedy of 6-year-old Ryker Roque, a Eustis boy who died in January from rabies he contracted from a bat his dad brought home from work in a bucket.
Jacobs said the county’s mosquito-control protocol has been efficient and bats aren’t worth the risk because they’re not particularly effective skeeter-eaters as they go for beetles, moths and other bugs, too.
The mayor said she considered bats about four years ago as a possible option to hold down mosquito swarms at her home in west Orange.
“I thought, ‘Could that be the answer?’ And I started doing a little research and realized, not a very good answer.”
Blissett-Clark said the Florida Bat Conservancy has applied for a grant that, if funded, would allow the group to build up to 30 bat houses in Orange County. The grant is administered by the Brevard Zoo.
“It's our belief that the positive outcomes we've seen in other municipalities can be replicated in Orange County,” she said, citing Cape Canaveral, Melbourne Beach, Miami, Tampa and Gainesville among cities using bat houses to aid in pest control programs.
Neither of BlissettClark’s rescue bats can fly because of permanent injury to their wings.
One, a Brazilian freetailed bat, was injured when it fell into a swimming pool and latched onto a chlorinating device that chemically burned its wing and permanently bleached a patch of its brown fur.
The other, a female evening bat, lost its ability to fly when it was caught by a cat that chewed its wing.