Story Photos
 Andrew Emlen checks out the bat house behind his own home. Roger Werth / The Daily News
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'Batman' to give Saturday presentation
Friday, March 6, 2009 10:14 AM PST
By Tom Paulu
Printable version
E-mail this articleAndrew Emlen isn’t afraid of bats. He even has a guest house for them a few paces outside his family’s back door.
“One bat we gave a name to (Nathan) because it came in every night,” Emlen said. Into the family’s house, that is, not the bat domicile.
Emlen will share his expertise about the furry, fear-inducing critters during a presentation Saturday afternoon in Longview.
“I’m fascinated by all wildlife,” Emlen said. “I think bats have a bigger PR problem because people know so little about them. That’s why I like to do” programs like this one.
Such slide show talks are old bat for Emlen, who combines formal education and first-hand experience with wildlife in his resume.
The 44-year-old has a master’s degree in environmental studies and was a field biology instructor for Clatsop Community College in Astoria. He also taught at OMSI in Portland and in Northern Minnesota, a place where copious mosquitoes attract bats.
Emlen, who lives on a 32-acre farm a few miles outside of Skamokawa, guides kayak trips out of the docks in town there and is the founder and compiler of the Wahkiakum Christmas Bird Count.
As a project for the North American Bat House Research Project, he and some students put up a structure on a pole in his back yard.
The wooden slab-like house has cracks 3/4-inch wide to let the bats in and out. “That’s all they need,” Emlen said. The house comes complete with “landing pad,” a roughened patch of wood.
Earlier this week, only one myotis was residing in the structure. “In about a month, this will have about 40 to 50 big brown bats,” Emlen predicted.
Aside from the pleasure of watching them flit though the skies, an advantage of bats is “they really clean out the insects,” Emlen said. One study showed that a bat can catch 600 mosquitoes in an hour.
During his talk Saturday, Emlen will show slides of some of the more interesting of the world’s 1,100 bat species. Ten species of bats live locally. One of them, the hoary bat, has a 2-foot wingspan and is sometimes mistaken for a bird in flight.
All local bats are insect eaters, as are 43 out of the 46 species found in the United States. The others feed on nectar. No vampire bats poke around in this country.
Vampire lore is one thing that gives people the creeps about bats. Another is the fear of rabies.
Though bats do carry the disease, it’s rarely spread to people, Emlen said. “You don’t want to pick one up. That’s how people generally get it.” A bat that’s still enough to be picked up is probably sick, he said.
Another precaution is to make sure cats are vaccinated against rabies in case the feline plays with a sick bat.
It’s pretty hard to avoid bats completely, Emlen said. “They say that everyone in this country lives within 100 yards of a bat part of the year.”
As for movies that show bats flocking around a person’s head, it’s unlikely they’ll run into you in the dark, he said, because they have excellent echolocation, the ability to detect objects.
Although he has seen only one “Batman’ movies, Emlen said “It’s inevitable that you’ll be called Batman if you do bat programs.”
His kid-friendly talk will also dispel some common bat myths and include “a few oddball stories about people interacting with bats.”
One of them tells of a research project during World War II. A dentist named Lytle Adams came up with the idea of fitting tiny incendiary bombs with time-delay fuses on hibernating bats and dropping them over Japan. The theory was the bats would roost under eaves and bombs would set off a firestorm.
It turned out to be a batty idea. “You can’t just snap a bat in and out of hibernation,” Emlen said. During a test, one of the bats blew up an American hangar and a general’s car. The project was grounded.
Ten species of bats live in the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum area:
Little brown bat
Fringed myotis
California myotis
Long-eared myotis
Long-legged myotis
Yuma myotis
Big brown bat
Silver-haired bat
Hoary bat
Townsend’s big-eared bat
If You Go
What: Presentation about bats by Andrew Emlen
When: 5 p.m. Saturday. The Annual membership meeting of the Willapa Hills Audobon Society will follow at Vernie's Pizza in The Triangle Shopping Center. The public is welcome.
Where: Lower Columbia College, Physical Science Room (PSC 102), next to 15th Avenue parking lot.
Cost: Free.
scratch007 wrote on Mar 6, 2009 12:46 PM:
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