I grew up working in this shop right here.

Always a tinker and fiddling with this and that.

When I was growing up, I always asked my dad how things work and taking them apart and tinkering with stuff and working on cars and, you know, made a lot of mistakes.

Anyway, I just fell into it.

Working on bat houses, I started way back before 2013.

Somewhere in there and just kind of building for Sunrift Adventures.

It's an outdoor shop.

We sell all kinds of outdoor gear climbing, backpacking, camping, you know, hiking.

And then we also have a bike shop now.

So we had bats in the barn there, and then we'd go up in the barn and they'd sometimes later in the afternoon, they'd be flying around and inside.

And so we, we sort of call it the Bat Cave.

We've been like, all right, we're going to the Bat Cave.

We always made fun of it, but we knew we had to get them out of there.

So all along they started trying to figure it out.

And so I called one of the DNR biologist Mary Bunch.

She said, yeah, you just got to build a bat house, you know, like, all right.

Funny how you fall into stuff, you know, but really got more inspired by building all the bat houses and manage the bats there.

And then the more I learned and more put up bat houses, the more I'd just like, want to do it more.

First, I have to get get the boards and then I'll have to cut them to length and, getting plans and get to work.

The hardest part about building the boxes, the grooves.

You know, a bat can really hang on almost anything because they have little hairs, like, kind of like Velcro on their claws.

So they can hang on almost nothing.

But when you're building that house, we really want to be kind of ideal.

So you cut these grooves and it's like sort of gives them a ladder to hang on to and more to hold on and grip.

And then I just really trying to put more around where I live here in TR, I kind of wanted to do more network in Travelers Rest, but I got them all over the state.

I put up over 60 bat houses now and average about, you know, 18 - 20 hours on each one.

Probably just on my own spare time.

I keep thinking to myself, I look because I keep them in my Google Maps, you know, my favorites.

And I look back on, like, how do I build that many?

I don't, I sometimes I don't believe myself, you know.

A lot of folks, started calling me the Batman of TR, but it's kind of stuck and it's finally, I love it.

I'm not the real Batman, but, I love it.

It's cool.

Yeah, bats are important to the environment because, all animals and ecosystems are for us, but, bats are big in the ecosystem.

They provide us with so many things and save farmers tons of money and pesticide use.

And they also provide over 400 consumer products.

They help bring to the table by pollination, seed spreading and eating tons of insects.

A lot of things affecting bats right now.

Habitat loss, pesticide use and white-nose syndrome mouths.

Really important to try to help them and to meet.

And so just the last few six years or more it's been really spent a lot of my spare time building bat boxes.

It's just special to me to, you know, get one up and then it gets occupied.

Pretty soon.

My idea is to get a a network of bat houses around and then show that it can work and help Bats are misunderstood and thought of as a nuisance.

Try to learn more about bats.

I would say A lot of things about bats are just super amazing.

How they fly, how they can catch bugs in total darkness by sound.

It's just kind of inspiring to least be part of something and try to help the community and help help the bats out.

Just a guy building some bat houses.