You don't have to be a biologist - or even an adult - to make a difference for bat conservation. You just have to care. Consider the delightful story of 6-year-old Analisa Bauhaus, as told by the Union Democrat newspaper in Sonora, California.
It took her a year, but she saved enough from her $3 weekly allowance to finance (with matching funds) three bat houses at Stanislaus National Forest.
Joy Barney , interpretive specialist at the forest's Summit Ranger District, made the arrangements, and logger Frank Scott volunteered to mount the bat houses at Pinecrest Lake, home to eight species of bats.
“When a child comes to you and has a project,” Barney told the newspaper, “it gets done.”
Mark Bauhaus told the Union Democrat that his daughter divides her allowance into three equal parts every week: a dollar for saving, a dollar for spending, and a dollar for giving away. He matches Analisa's charity total, and Sun Microsystems, where Bauhaus is a vice president, matches the family total.
This year, Bauhaus said, Analisa told him: “I want to give something to the forest, to the animals.” So she called the Stanislaus forest, where Barney suggested bat houses as a needed and worthy project.
Many of the bats that live around Pinecrest Lake, the newspaper reports, roost in tree hollows or under the loose bark of old or dead trees. But there aren't many trees like that left in the national forest.
The nursery houses installed near the lake will offer bats a safe and comfortable place to give birth and raise their pups.
About 25 kids and 20 adults showed up for the bat-house dedication. The children, Mark Bauhaus said, “get to see the power of what a little money and a lot of caring can do.”
