Join BirdNote tomorrow, November 30th!
Illustrator David Sibley and actor H. Jon Benjamin will face off in the bird illustration battle of the century during BirdNote's Year-end Celebration and Auction!
Bats - Fear or Appreciation?
Bats need all the help they can get!
© J. Scott Altenbach
Bats.... creatures to regard with superstition and fear? On summer evenings, bats put on an aerial display while eating hundreds of mosquitoes. Kent Woodruff of the US Fish and Wildlife Service spearheaded a project to save Townsend's big-eared bats. They preserved an old cabin that the bats had used as a nursery. Then they built an almost identical - but permanent - structure nearby, and the bats moved in! Thanks, Kent!
BirdNote®
Bats - Fear or Appreciation
Written by Chris Peterson with Kent Woodruff
This is BirdNote!
Ravens (caw caw), black cats (meeeowwww) and bats.... creatures to regard with superstition and fear?
Summer evenings, bats put on an aerial display while eating hundreds of mosquitoes. Let’s “rewind” to that time in summer, and go looking for bats with wildlife biologist Kent Woodruff. Kent and others provided a safe haven for Townsend’s Big-eared bats by preserving an old cabin that the bats used as a nursery.
(G6T7 0:48) …after we moved this in the late fall, the next summer I probably came out here 20 times and looked in the windows here and checked, starting in May, and checked all the way through June and July and early August, and nothing ….. And I said “It didn’t work.”
But then…
(G7T8 1:15) We were getting ready to go on a family vacation to the Midwest and I said, “I better make one more trip out there. So I came out here with my ten year old son at the time, and we got here and I boosted him up to look in the window on the other side, and he said ‘Dad there’s bats all over in here!….To find ‘em all in here was a very exciting day.”
Imagine peering into a room of 200 endangered bats. Which response would you have?
(SHRIEK) or “Dad there’s bats all over in here!”
The choice is yours. One is far better for wildlife! For BirdNote, I’m Michael Stein.
###
Call of the Raven provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by L.J. Peyton.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org October 2012 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# bats-03-2009-10-31-MS bats-03
