BELFAIR, Wash. — On a Christmas tree farm outside Belfair where he lives to save money on rent, Jeremy Orsborn is rebuilding his life.
“There's like a stretch of a few years where there's a lot of traumatic tragic stuff that happened,” Orsborn said. “ I kinda had to process it. One option is to find something really constructive to do. The other would be to find something really destructive to do, you know, so I really did not want to go that route so it kind of just came to me.”
Orsborn builds bat boxes. Each one is capable of providing shelter for hundreds of microbats.
“I mean they're pretty tiny,” Orsborn said. “They're like little cotton balls and they squish together. “
Orsborn said his fascination with bats began years ago with a visit to the Bracken Caves outside San Antonio.
“It's the largest bat colony on the planet,” Orsborn said. “That was an insane experience. It was like a tornado of bats for like three hours.”
Here in Washington, Orsborn started up the non-profit Bat Revival Projekt to give bats some much needed good public relations.
“That Covid thing,” Orsborn said, shaking his head. “That triggered people to start going in and burning down colonies and gassing them in their attics and stuff like that.”
Orsborn says bats are nature's own mosquito abatement program.
“The fact that they can eat like 600 to 1,000 an hour is pretty incredible,” he said. “They are the only mammal that flies. They're the fastest mammal on the planet.”
Orsborn paints the boxes black to absorb heat. For months he installed them for free near logging areas.
“If you're gonna move somewhere and clear a bunch of land you need to deal with the animals that are displaced,” he said.
He has sold his bat boxes at the Belfair Saturday Market.
His nickname is Batman,” said Sandi Fleury who sells baked goods there. “He's my buddy!”
“It's turning into something a lot bigger than I expected,” Orsborn said. “About every one I build, by the time I finish it, I have sold three more. “
Orsborn sold a bat box to the Blanchard family outside Gig Harbor.
“From what I understand bats are really good to eat the bugs and I don't like bugs,” Chris Blanchard said.
For $150, Orsborn installed a box on a 20 foot pole in the Blanchard backyard.
“You want it out in the open but you want it close enough so they can get in tree coverage from all of the owls and hawks,” says Orsborn.
The Blanchards asked for a special inscription on the box.
“I don't think we can really show that on TV but it was my idea,” laughs Blanchard about the three word phrase that begins with “Bat” and ends with “Crazy”.
In a year or two as many as 600 bats could be living there.
“I'm pretty stoked,” says Orsborn. “When they come out of hibernation next year they'll be able to find it easy.”
By helping a entirely different species, Jeremy Orbson is well on the road to helping himself.
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