Some plants can create shelter along with food. When consulting with Gabriel Willow of Prospect Park Audubon Society, he suggested using a juniper for the double duty. Birds can hide under the cascading branches, and robins in particular like the seeds they produce. We also used a dwarf pine tree for winter duty, but felt that a bird box of some sort was still needed.

Tiffany researched a kestrel box, but we wondered about the ethics of trying to attract a bird of prey along with smaller birds, or, er, the prey. It might get little too wild west out there, and Schjanna would wake to death screams and feathers flying.

Gabriel had also suggested a bat box, since they are pretty flat and would fit nicely on a small terrace. Few people would agree to have a bat box on their balcony, but fortunately, Schjanna was one of them. Her boyfriend balked a little, until she assured him that each bat eats around 600 mosquitoes in one night.

I spoke with Sonal Bhatt, the Assistant Director of Interpretation for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who worked in a bat lab at Boston University as an undergraduate student. She passed along some reasons why she came to like bats:

They are studied for their energy efficiency. She explained that between feeding and flying, they stay right on the edge of all limits. "They are well oiled machines."

Bats are cute. "Not all, like the Least-Nosed bat, but the Brown bat has a cute little face."

The Brown bat eats 600 insects an hour--the pests that destroy gardens.

In the state of New York there are nine species of bats.

Bats everywhere in the world are critical to the eco-system. In some tropical climates, they are the sole pollinators of certain flowers. If they die off, that species of plant does as well.

When I asked her why people were scared of bats, she thought it was because we can't see them very well, and because of their association with darkness. Now many bats are becoming endangered in different parts of the world because there aren't enough trees and caves for them to roost in. So the more bat boxes, the better.