Penn’s Haley Nero bat project is a hit
Haley Nero is known for sticking with things. She started playing the flute in fourth grade through PennTrafford School District and picked up a few other instruments along the way. In middle school, she completed a painstaking project on Hannah Penn, wife of William Penn, for a Heinz History Center competition and won second place. It was even easier to stick with Girl Scouts since second grade because it helped her make friends and provided lots of “fun activities.”
With a track record like that, topping off her Girl Scouts career with a Gold Award project didn’t intimidate her, and she leaned on her love for history to get it done.
The barn at Staymates Cabin Park in Murrysville houses Civil Warera military uniforms, but bats were an enemy to their preservation. For her project, Haley decided to humanely relocate the bats using homemade bat boxes, hoping to honor the mammals’ important place in the ecosystem and save the uniforms.
“It could ruin the ecosystem’s balance if you just kill the bats,” she said. “They eat a lot of harmful bugs.”
She’s right. Thank bats for keeping the populations of mosquitos, green stink bugs, cucumber beetles, flies and more in check.
The tough part, she says, was building the bat boxes because she’d never done something like that before. She followed instructions provided by the Murrysville Recreation Department and created two boxes that were then affixed to the barn. Instead of flying into the barn and damaging its contents, the bats are now attracted to the boxes and choose to rest there instead.
Haley, who turns 20 this month, attends Kenyon University, where she majors in creative writing. She hopes to become a writer or philosophy scholar and knows the values learned in Girl Scouts will help to guide her.
“There’s the value of hard work,” she said, “but there’s also the idea of being able to achieve things on your own but also getting help when you need it. It sort of strikes a balance.”