Boy Scouts Bat Condos: How We Teach IPM Through Eagle Scout Projects
Partnering with Scout troops to design, site, and install bat condos — turning Eagle projects into real-world lessons in integrated pest management.
Kyle D. Peczkowski
Board Certified Master Arborist & Urban Forester
The barn had been leaning since before any of the Scouts were born. Built in the 1910s on what is now county open space, it had outlasted three ranching families, two roof replacements, and a wildfire that stopped at the fence line.
When the troop approached us about an Eagle project, the easy answer would have been a trail bridge or an interpretive sign. Instead we walked them through the barn, showed them the hand-hewn Douglas fir posts, and asked whether they wanted to do something harder.
Over eight weekends they replaced sill plates, re-shimmed the foundation piers, and rebuilt the tack room door with lumber milled from a hazard oak we had removed the previous winter. A retired timber framer volunteered his Saturdays. A parent who happened to be an architect drew the load path on graph paper.
The barn is not why the county owns that parcel. The oak savanna and the creek are. But the barn is why the neighbors show up to the open house, why the Scouts came back the next year to help plant riparian willow, and why a piece of infrastructure that predates the parcel's protection is still standing to teach the next cohort what durable construction looks like.
Natural resource work is a long game, and long games need places where people gather. Sometimes that place is a trailhead. Sometimes it is a barn that a group of thirteen-year-olds kept from falling down.