Intrepid Naturalist Took to His Job Right Off the Bat

Some would accuse him of having bats in the belfry, which is just fine with naturalist Thomas French, who would be the first to admit that he’s just wild about bats. “Look at this! A nice pipistrelle and a nice keen!” French whispered inside a deep, black cave where he was conducting a “bat count” for the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife. The state tallies the number of bats each year to ensure their well-being, after several species were nearly devastated by the use of DDT and other pesticides. French thinks nothing of squeezing himself into tiny caves that would spook the most courageous and has descended into 100-foot mine shafts to track the night creatures. And he is quick to come to bat for the much-maligned mammals. “They are as small as a mouse, tiny, tiny, and they can live to 20 or 30 years,” he said. “That’s why they’re so vulnerable. If you kill a lot of them, their recovery is slow. They produce only one young each per year.”

--The only thing that kept him going was knowing that the next day his ordeal would end. Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young ventured out onto the streets of his city dressed as a street person, not eating until he was given a bologna sandwich as a handout and spending the night in a shelter. “I really was afraid of the shelter,” he said. “When we finally got there, I was so tired, I got my pad and I hit the floor and I was asleep right away.” Young was accompanied by a reporter for WSB-TV, who also posed as a homeless person, and hidden cameras followed them for a program that aired on national TV. Young was grateful when it was over. “That’s the thing that makes this acceptable to us--that whenever we really run out we have somewhere to go,” Young said.

--The director of a home for abused children has come rushing to the defense of TV talk show host David Letterman. Paul Browne, who runs the Marion County Children’s Guardian Home in Indiana, said he was upset with a series running in a newspaper in Letterman’s hometown of Indianapolis that shows the comedian only as a “crazy guy,” while Browne contends he is quite the humanitarian. Browne says that Letterman’s lawyer showed up at the home near Christmas with a donation of $43,000 from the TV star. Browne said the Letterman fund would be used to support counseling and extracurricular activities, and buy books and playground equipment for the preschoolers.