NORTH PORT, Fla. (SNN TV) — If you’ve visited a park in North Port recently, you may have thought Bruce Wayne was being summoned by the bat signal.
Bat-shaped designs have nested on top of tall poles throughout the area, and there’s a golden reason for it.
North Port High School junior Krysta Fowler has been in the Girl Scouts most of her life.
“This is my 12th year being in Girl Scouts,” Krysta said.
And while she loves selling them, she said the organization is about more than Girl Scout cookies.
“A lot of people, they think Girl Scouts meet and sit around at a table and do crafts, but we do so much more than that!” she said.
One example stemmed from a day when she was walking to North Port High School and saw a bat on the wall.
“I kind of just ignored it and walked into school,” said Krysta. “My friend, she came into school saying there was a bat on the ground and somebody stepped on it.”
She wouldn’t stop talking about it to her mom or her friends, so she began researching bats and found out they’re a keystone species.
“A keystone species is a species where other species or even entire ecosystems depend on that animal, or even a plant, to survive,” Krysta explained.
They travel farther than bees and butterflies to pollinate.
“Bats provide over 300 types of different fruits, such as your bananas and mangos, that you find at your local supermarket,” Krysta said.
Suddenly, her bat talk didn’t seem so batty!
And this is where bats and her life as a Girl Scout merge. There’s a certain award that’s the highest you can get as a scout called the gold award.
“I took my research and I was like, ‘What can I do with this to turn it into a gold award?’ Because there are requirements, one of them being [devoting] 80 hours into your project,” she explained. “So I was like, ‘Okay, so I need to turn my research into a project that I can put 80 hours into at least.'”
She did community outreach at events to talk about what bats do for us and the ecosystem.
But most importantly, she made bat houses — they’re located at the Scout house across from Dallas White Park, Garden of the Five Senses, and Blue Ridge Park.
These houses give bats a safe place to live and breed. Krysta said she chose pole mounts instead of trees for the houses because bats dive out of the house, so there aren’t leaves and branches in the way for the winged animals.
And as luck would have it, the City of North Port has delved into protecting the local bat population. Last summer, the Environmental Conservancy of North Port donated bat houses to the city to give the bats in the Butler Park pavilion an alternate spot to roost.
“And in return, they’re helping us by keeping insect populations, including mosquitoes, in check,” said Dillon George, Recreation Supervisor for the City of North Port Parks & Recreation Department.
Krysta said being a “batvocate” is working. She cited her friend with whom she explained her bat house project.
“And she’s like, ‘They’re diseased! They’re so diseased!’ And I was like, I have a whole bunch of information and a website. I’ve shared that with her, and she’s kind of like, not sure about bats yet, but she’s not trying to say that she wants to kill them anymore,” Krysta said.
“Yeah, progress!” she added with a laugh.
Krysta set up a website for this project at batvocateswfl.com.