Indiana Bats are Invaluable, and They Do Not Deserve a Bad Rap

It's not a lamppost - I know it's hard to identify at this angle, but the box on top of the tall post in the photo is a bat house. The house on the shorter post is a blue bird house, which unfortunately barn swallows like to commandeer for themselves.

An Indiana bat could use this space for shelter in the summer. Bats in this part of the country have to migrate and hibernate in the winter. Indiana owns the distinction of a bat species named in its honor - Myotis sodalis is a smallish, plain grey batty with the common name Indiana bat. In summer months it lives all over the eastern and Midwestern United States; in winter the bats come together and hibernate in groups of thousands in just a few caves.

An endangered species, the number of Indiana bats has declined by about 50 percent in the past 25 years. Part of this decline has been caused by the deadly White-Nose Syndrome, a fungus which is thought to have caused over five million bat deaths by 2012. The bats are dying as the disease spreads during the hibernation process.

Conservationists are familiar with pioneering scientist Merlin Tuttle, who has worked most of his life to keep bats alive. Humans have been slow to understand the importance of bats in the world ecosystems. Bats pollenate plants, disperse seeds, and eat tons of insects. Bats are for the most part shy and reclusive, but humans have beaten, chased, smoked them out of caves and attempted to annihilate them.

As a teenager, Tuttle discovered one of the country's largest populations of hibernating bats in a Knoxville, TN cave. Thus began his long career as a scientist and persona número uno for bats. For decades, he learned to communicate with stubborn farmers, landowners, and moonshiners so as to get passage to explore caves - sometimes places humans didn't seem to know about. Repelling, climbing, risking life and limb - his lifelong passion is legendary.

By 1986, Tuttle was leading the new Bat Conservation International group, and Austin, Texas had seen an incredible influx of one and 1/2 million Brazilian free-tailed bats. They had settled downtown beneath the city's Congress Avenue Bridge, and their nightly cyclone trail darkened the skies as the millions streamed out to feed.

Tuttle did a huge job convincing people the bats were harmless and actually very helpful in so many ways. Among his other accomplishments, Tuttle petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the grey Myotis bats as federally endangered, after having discovered vital bat roosts had been burned out by kerosene torches. These are bats that would scour the night air for insects, eating Mosquitos and crop pests. A single bat can eat 3000 insects per night, feeding by echolocation.

Bats can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Indiana bats are only about two inches long and weigh 1/4 ounce. Scientists have to look at size of feet and length of toe hairs to differentiate Indiana bats from other species. If you happen to find a bat, don't touch it with your bare hands. If it bites you, it will need to be destroyed and tested for rabies (unlikely though to have it). In a summer night sky, I enjoy watching a bat feed, fluttering and darting over the water. I think of the female, nursing her single young, that needs a month's worth of growth and mother's milk before it can learn to fly. Regard the bat, respect it, and see it as the blessing it is.