With Halloween just around the corner, Tagawa Gardens is all dressed up and ready for our annual Pumpkin Festival.  If it’s good family fun you’re after, you can choose from a long list of ticketed activities that celebrate the season:  pumpkin decorating, air tattoos, big bubbles that let you walk on water and an inflatable obstacle course to name a few.  But mixed in with all that, we’re offering a light-hearted but educational twist. Tagawa’s wants to take the “creepy” out of some of the amazing animals that so often symbolize this time of year.

Let’s start with bats!

The Bat Cave at Tagawa’s Pumpkin Festival is a great way to get kids (of all ages) to begin to see bats as the amazing animals that they are.

Take Little Brown bats, for instance.  They’re some of the most common bats found in the Denver area.  Personally, I think they’re super cute!

Even if their appearance doesn’t win your heart, consider this.  A nursing Little Brown bat can eat more than her weight in mosquitoes every night.  That’s like a person eating 80 pizzas!  Over the course of a year, a small colony of bats can eat one ton of insects!  That could add up to more than six-million  mosquitoes that will never have a chance to bite or spread disease.

Bats’ amazing echolocation is a wonder in itself.  The sound waves they emit to locate their prey can detect an object as fine as a human hair.  That’s impressive!

And despite the “creepy” factor, bats are amazingly clean.  They routinely groom themselves for hours… much like the sweet kitty that claims your couch as its own.

At Tagawa’s Pumpkin Festival, guests big and small can spin our Bat Wheel of Fortune and test their knowledge of bat trivia.  The kiddos can color a bat their own bat add it to the colony inside our Bat Cave.  It’s quite a site as the population grows!

We’d love to see our Pumpkin Fest guests leave with a new appreciation and respect for the bats we’re blessed to have as neighbors!

And then there are spiders…

Spiders get their time in the limelight at Pumpkin Fest, too.  After all, spiders are a gardener’s friend!

With the exception of Black Widows, any spiders I find in my house get a free ride outside where they can do the job Mother Nature designed them to do:  hunt!

Did you know that one of Colorado’s most common spiders, Wolf spiders, are actually good moms?  They can carry their babies (a.k.a. “spiderlings”) around on back until they’re ready to head out on their own.  Nice!

Pumpkin Festival has a Spider’s Lair where guests can learn that spiders, like bats, are shy by nature and just want to be left alone.

Free presentations presented on various days over the three weekends of Pumpkin Fest will feature insects and arthropods, a talk on wolves, an albino python, Rosie the tarantula and many more.  The schedule changes so check the calendar at tagawagardens.com for details.

Come have fun and learn at the same time!  You may find that what you thought were creepy critters aren’t so creepy after all.

Find more details about the event here!

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