Construction halted to allow baby bats to mature in Watsonville

UPDATE 06/27/18 5:38PM An agreement has been reached after Wildlife Emergency Services expressed concern with how the construction of a building would impact a colony of bats.

Pajaro Valley Prevention in Watsonville is replacing their building’s Spanish tile roof that has been home to a colony of Yuma bats for many years.

“Bats have lived here historically under this tiled roof. This is a historic colony and people would come here and watch these bats fly around traffic and eat these bugs,” says Rebecca Dmytryk with wildlife emergency services.

Originally, they planned to do it during bat pupping season until they were informed that continued demolition places pregnant female bats and their pups in grave danger.

Dmytryk says the bats, “can’t be disturbed this time of year and unfortunately there’s no real black and white clear laws that tell people to halt construction as with migratory birds. So it’s really difficult when people have to do construction like this cause there’s nothing really black and white that stops it.”

The construction company, and building owners have since come to a compromise with wildlife rescue.

“There’s lots of different aspects to this that have to be taken care of. One is the health and safety of our workers in our facility as well as taken care of the bats so we’re trying to make sure we take care of everybody and come to a solution which we believe we have. We’re definitely going to postpone (construction) until September.”

Pupping season is considered to be over on September 1st when the newborn bats are able to fly and can safely evacuate the tile.

Wildlife services pointed out the bat population around the world is decreasing and that every bit of protection helps.

“Bats are really helpful to humans, they eat a thousand mosquitos an hour, each bat so we don’t want to hurt them, they really deserve protection. So whenever we disrupt or destroy a colony we’re really doing a disservice to ourselves as well,” says Dmytryk.

Now building owners, wildlife rescue and the construction company say they will be working together to build a new habitat for bats in this area to call their home.

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An agreement has been reached after Wildlife Emergency Services expressed concern with how the construction of a building would impact a colony of bats.

Pajaro Valley Prevention in Watsonville is replacing their building’s Spanish tile roof that has been home to a colony of Yuma bats for many years. Originally, they planned to do it during bat pupping season.

Pajaro Valley Prevention and Moreno Roofing were informed continued demolition places pregnant female bats and their pups in grave danger and have since come to an agreement to halt further demolition until after September 1st when the baby bats will be old enough to fly.

KION’s Ashley Keehn will have more on this story at 5 and 6.