Bats, owls get new homes thanks to Mount Pearl students

A group of students at O'Donel High School in Mount Pearl have spent the last month of their class time building houses, but the houses are a little batty.

The houses are designed for brown bats and owls, andstudents and their teachers presented them to the Oxen Pond Botanical Gardens on Tuesday.

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Teacher Joe Santos said he was approached by a student who was working with her Girl Guide group tohelp bats and owls in Newfoundland.

"When she came to me, then we came up with the idea of doing some research and designing and fabricating some of these bat and owl houses," hesaid.

Santos and his design fabrication students looked further in to the matter and set to work on building the houses.

Santos said the homes are designed to protect the bats from external threats and allow them to roost. The students built a number of the houses to be placed in different locations throughout the botanical gardens.

Santos said the brown bats are an integral part of the ecosystem because they consume nearly half their weight in insects every night, and Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the few places where there is a healthy population, so it is important to protect them.

"There is a disease called white-nose syndrome that's hit bats all over the world and killed billions and billions of bats," he said.

"But, Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the only places in Canada right now that is safe from this."

Teacher Rod Lundrigan said the design of the houses made use of scrap material from other trades classes that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill, helping both the bats and the environment.

Santos said that he and his students enjoyed the work and are always open to new projects.