Houses for bats were placed in the yard of a Ruse school

Friday, 18 November 2022

Houses for bats and newly planted trees help the children from Olimpi Panov Elementary School to get to know the biodiversity of urban ecosystems.

Yesterday, the graduates of the Ruse school took part in an action by planting different varieties of fruit trees, and museum specialists from the "Nature" department of the Regional History Museum in Ruse told them more about birds and bats and set up special houses in the hope of developing populations of mammals in the future.

Mayor Pencho Milkov also took part in the event.

"There should be more such places in our city. "Bats can be very useful for us humans, and in this way we will teach children to care for animals and biodiversity," he said.

Krasimir Kirov, Magdalena Trifonova and Viktoria Drumeva explained to the children that planting the trees creates a food base of insects for the birds and bats in the big city. The students will take care of the planted trees for several years so that they can form a crown, bear fruit and be useful to bats and birds as places for foraging, resting during migration, forming nests and shelters. Varieties are specially selected to provide a "wider window" for flowering and fruiting of the trees. Thus, they will be visited by more insects from March until the month of May. The fruit trees will be grown without the use of plant protection products. Children will be able to use the fruit for healthy food.

The activities are part of the "Flying Birds - our flying friends" project of the "Friends of the Museum" Association - Ruse, with the support of the "Culture" Program, Direction "Creative Projects in the Field of Arts and Culture" of the Municipality of Ruse, 2022. As part of it, an aid was also issued, which introduces children to migration and the types of migratory birds such as red-breasted goose, mallard, black stork, white and black stork, city swallow and Egyptian vulture. It also includes stickers that provoke and help students remember the nesting and wintering places of different species of birds, paying attention to the different types of vultures and their characteristics. The aid was printed with the financial support of the project "New hope for the Egyptian vulture", coordinated by the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds BirdLife Bulgaria

The goal of the project organizers is to show that bats are not at all scary, but on the contrary – different and cute. In Bulgaria there are 33 species out of a possible 35 in Europe and all of them are insectivorous. Bats are very useful: they eat insects. In cities, they help fight mosquitoes: a small brown bat can eat a thousand mosquitoes in one evening. In agriculture, they help because most of the insects they feed on are crop pests.

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