Leslie Sturges

Baturday News is a weekly blog written by Rachael, a 6th grade student and Save Lucy volunteer. Why is turning off the lights so important to bats? All bats are nocturnal. They sleep in dark spaces during the day and come out at night to feed. Nocturnal animals need a dark night in order to survive. Bats have evolved to have night vision. This helps them find food at night and might help them see predators better. A lot of studies have been done, and scientists think that bats don’t see well in the light. One study showed that bats seem to get confused when there is a lot of light and start bumping into things. This probably means that bats don’t only rely on echolocation to figure out where they are going. They probably also rely on their eyesight, which is specialized for the night. Most bats wait until it is dark outside to come out of their roosts to hunt. Some studies have shown that some bats will avoid well lit areas when they come out of their roosts. These bats might wait until it is darker later at night to come out and return to their roosts sooner when manmade lights are turned on in the morning. This means that they might have less time to eat. This might cause a problem for bat babies because their mothers may not get enough food to eat. If a baby bat is undernourished it might not develop properly or it might not survive the winter because it won’t have enough fat reserves during hibernation. It’s obvious that bats need darkness to survive. If people would turn off lights that aren’t needed, it would help bats a lot. People should turn off their porch lights when they go to bed […]

Hello. My name is Rachael. I am happy to be the newest volunteer here at The Save Lucy Campaign. I am a 6th grade student, but because I am not old enough to work with the bats, I will be writing Lucy’s blog. Since Lucy is a bat, she can’t do it on her own! I hope she’s happy with the job I do for her. I will try to write something every week for the “Baturday News”. I’ll be writing about the bats that visit my house every year and interesting bat facts. I hope that everyone who reads my blog learns about bats and how wonderful they are and how they need our help to survive.             Since the bats aren’t here yet, I’ll keep you informed of interesting bat facts that I learn while talking to the people here at The Save Lucy Campaign. My first interesting fact is about how many different kinds of bats there are. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, there are 5,488 different mammal species. There are about 1,200 species of bats. This means that just over 1/5 of all the mammal species in the world are bats! Some of them are very tiny and are only about an inch long and some of them are HUGE and have wingspans of more than 4 feet long. Most bats are pretty small. Most of the bats in the world eat insects, some eat fruit and some eat other things like fish. Yes, I know that vampire bats are huge, scary, drink blood and swoop down out of nowhere in the MOVIES! But, there are only 3 kinds of vampire bats and they rarely drink human blood and they are about the same size as […]