Girl Scout troop builds new homes for Norwalk’s bats
NORWALK — The city’s bats have new homes after a Rowayton Girl Scout troop built 24 bat houses to be placed throughout the Rowayton area.
The troop built the boxes, with the help of the Rowayton Gardeners and the Norwalk Land Trust, as part of a “take action project,” troop leader Liette Roussy said. Those projects, unlike regular service projects, are designed to have a longterm effect on the community, she said.
The troop of 15 fifthgrade girls spent Friday afternoon building and painting the boxes at the Rowayton Gardeners’ potting shed.
The boxes cost about $30 each and were funded by the Rowayton Gardeners, the group’s President Kathy Leeds said. The Rowayton Gardeners and Norwalk Land Trust joined the project following a post on the neighborhood forum Nextdoor by one of the troop leaders, Sarah Wayland.
“We’ve been hampered so much by COVID regulations, we haven’t been doing many projects,” Leeds said. “We just completed a clean out of the potting shed so we would be ready for this first project. I have no doubt there are enough bats around here to fill them.”
The idea to build bat boxes came about following a troop trip to the Fairfield Audubon Society last fall, where
the girls learned bats are endangered, Roussy said.
“When we talked about our take action project they were drawn to, ‘Let’s donate to the humane society. How can we help puppies and cats?’ To go to bats, they were like, ‘Okay, how is that going to go?’” Roussy said. “They don’t see it or can’t visualize how it’ll help the bats.”
Through their research and preparation for the project, however, the troop began to realize the positive influence bats have on the local environment and warmed to the project, Wayland said.
“They were really interested and liked the idea of building houses and something little,” Wayland said. “The idea of bats living in them was getting exciting.”
Though the boxes were built Friday, the troop is still finalizing
the details of where and how the homes will be installed.
Often, bat boxes are attached to special poles, with two boxes attached back-to-back. But the poles cost around $100 each, a cost which the troop cannot afford, Wayland said. The boxes can also be attached to the sides of houses, but need to be near sources of water,
which poses another hurdle for the group.
Nevertheless, many community members have offered their homes as suitable locations to attach the boxes, and the Norwalk Land Trust has aided the troop in identifying locations for the bat homes, Wayland said. The troop plans to have them installed in the coming weeks.