Save the Bats : Dee and John Lockwood are committed to a daunting task: re-educating the public about the ecological importance of creatures with a bad rap.
Dee Lockwood is serving afternoon tea and cookies. She is at her kitchen table, bathed in sunlight that pours in through a picture window, the setting and her hospitality and speech the essence of suburban gentility.
But the discussion is bats: their habits, their homes, their value to the world, the bum rap they suffer in the press.
“Hey,” says Lockwood, “would you like to see some bat guano?”
She pauses, takes a sip of tea.
“I mean, these guys eat insects at an amazing rate. They’re working all night cleaning things up. Their guano is loaded with bug parts--moth eyeballs and such--that the bat doesn’t digest.”
In a flash she’s outside the picture window, down on the front lawn picking up a tiny black pellet. She returns to the kitchen table, opens her bare hand, and there, in the center of her palm, it rests: a tiny black tubule she will carefully place on the tabletop next to her tea, a veritable gemstone of scat.
Her mate, John Lockwood, smears a piece of it on a slide, pops it under a nearby microscope, and pronto: a kaleidoscope of gnat legs and torn sheets of moth eyeball rods and cones, an infinite junkyard of the undigested but decimated, a collage of seemingly ancient life fragments.
Dee lifts the plate of chocolate chip cookies.
“Care for one? Isn’t it just amazing?”
BAT ADVOCACY
Dee and John Lockwood are, for want of a better term, bat guerrillas.
They live in a large, modern, airy home on a waterway channel of the Ventura Keys. They’re fit, gracious, comported just as you would expect in this upscale neighborhood. But on their street of expensive cars, the Lockwood driveway is overwhelmed by a tan motor home with a large message emblazoned on both sides:
SAVE THE BATS
SALVE LOS MURCIELAGOS
The neighbors at first didn’t get it. Then they feared it. Then, says Dee and John, they got to know the Lockwoods personally and, more importantly, the nature of their bat advocacy. Some have even seen Dee’s brown bat in the basement freezer or John’s brown bat in alcohol in the Ball jar by the kitchen sink--and managed not to shriek.
It’s a measure of the Lockwoods’ success in telling their story about the role bats have in the ecology of Ventura County and California, Mexico and the world. Their basic message is: Bats are our friends, not enemies, and if they are threatened so is the world as we all know it.
They spread this message with facts, a practical array of things that matter in everyday life to most people.
Among the amazing factoids they report, most furnished by Bat Conservation International (BCI), in Austin, Tex., are that bats are nature’s bug-zappers (a single brown bat can catch 600 mosquitoes an hour), re-pollinators (cactus, including agave and saguaro, depend largely upon reseeding by bats, as do countless plant and tree species in tropical rain forests in South America), and most ubiquitous species (nearly 1,000 kinds of bats account for nearly 25% of all mammal species on Earth).
To illustrate the rapacity of bats toward annoying insects and crop-damaging bugs--and our unacknowledged debt to them--the Lockwoods cite a now-famous cave in Bracken, Tex., where 3 million bats live and nightly consume 250,000 pounds of bugs. Without those bats and their insecticide role, farm crops would be eaten, and people everywhere on back porches as well as the agriculture industry would increasingly contaminate the earth with chemical insecticides.
Obviously, mosquitoes and flies in the Ventura Keys are small pickins’ by comparison. But there too nature’s undesirables are held in check by Ventura’s ample population of little brown, little-seen bats. And then, of course, there are the varieties of desert plants that spring up from seeds within the multitudinous bat guano.
The Lockwoods use their own time and money to visit school classrooms in Ventura County, to farms and ranches where misunderstood bats are reported to be “a potential problem,” or to Mexico’s rural outback. It’s a calling of sorts, an inspiration mined in midlife following divorces from previous marriages, a way to commit to something they both truly care about: the natural world.
But it took a while for them to learn this message, let alone sell it.
GETTING PAST UCKY
The love of bats started first with Dee, who, a decade ago, was a housewife on vacation in Oregon. She found an injured bat, put it in a cage and observed it. “It was amazing to watch it move about,” she says. “It was actually quite beautiful.”
She was raising a family in Los Angeles at the time. Intrigued by her experience, she called the UCLA office of Pat Brown, a scientist who has conducted bat studies on the Channel Islands. Brown introduced Dee to a healthy bat in her lab.
“It was in the palm of my hand, a tiny little thing,” Dee says, “and it was calling out to its mama. Once I saw it up close, I was hooked. I fell in love.”
That, of course, is a considerable achievement for an adult who, like most of us, grew up learning that bats were grotesque, evil creatures hanging upside down in trees and inclined to dive-bomb innocent people for the purpose of getting caught in their hair--and possibly sinking vicious little teeth into their scalp or, even, sucking their blood.
Dee and John would, in a 1991 trip to Mexico, prove the folly of this myth.
“We were in a cave with 200,000 bats,” says John. “I’ll tell you this: They don’t get tangled in your hair. They brush by. We held our arms up as they flew by--not a single hit. Except for a few species, they don’t take off like birds--they must fall 4 feet from their perch in order to gain loft and then momentum. They simply will not hit you. People mistake this fall at the start of flight as a dive at them.”
Kris Mashburn, an Ojai naturalist who promotes the cause of bats, describes the menacing psychology that runs against bats: “I talk to children, and they quickly take to bats. But overall it’s hard to change people, especially adults. For many, when bats are the subject, there’s just no way to change that ucky thing.”
The Ucky thing.
Consider it: Bats are alien at first glance.
They do hang upside down. They do bare their teeth, though this has nothing to do with an intention to bite; they must hold their mouths open in order to operate their sonar, or send out the little beeps that find things in a process called echolocation. Their ears are huge, but then hearing those beeps bounce back off approaching objects gives them “sight.” They do fly helter-skelter at times, but that’s less about being crazed than complete in their search for information--including a dinner of insects--around them. They do look like rodents at times, but they’re not. The scientific world, which classifies bats as mammals, now is in debate about whether bats are actually related to us, as primates: Their opposing thumbs and reproductive cycles seem to suggest as much.
Yes, they can bite, though rarely, and when they do, it almost exclusively occurs as the result of being injured or sick and confused and then picked up by a human. The truth is, a normal healthy bat has no interest in you and would have to be sadistically provoked before biting.
Still, they’re ucky to so many.
And the ucky thing, as well as misinformation, is why bat populations worldwide have declined over the last few decades.
BCI cites farmers in the Midwest and West, frightened that their livestock would be vulnerable to bat-borne rabies, who have torched caves that were home to millions of bats. Yet bats carry rabies at only a fraction of the rate assigned to raccoons or dogs, both of which mingle with people.
And frightened people everywhere have assaulted bat habitats--in trees, behind window shutters in houses, between roof tiles on garages, anywhere there is dark, narrow, cool, protected space, just because they are unknown creatures of the night.
These reflexive decimations of bats are made lasting by the extremely slow reproductive rate of bats, which have one baby each annually.
The fright factor and myth factor is so pervasive that Dee and John Lockwood, on tour in bat-rich Mexico to distribute pamphlets lavishing praise on bats, returned only to say a typical adult reaction to the logo on their motor home is, “Los vampiros meurdan a qui” (the vampires bite here), with a hand gesture to the neck.
But vampire bats, nowhere to be seen in these parts, are merely one small species based largely in Mexico and Central America, though still only a minute part of bat populations there. These mouse-sized creatures do nourish themselves on the blood of animals--cleverly, as well, by first emitting an anesthetic from their saliva. They hold medical promise to humans, BCI asserts, because of a yet-to-be synthesized anticoagulant naturally secreted in their saliva.
PITCHING A MESSAGE
Dee and John Lockwood figure they spend the equivalent of five full days a month in their bat “evangelism,” to borrow John’s word. The rest of the time they manage about 12 apartment units in properties they own in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Occasionally, John does free-lance studio photography--once his full-time job.
But bats are central to their lives, central to their rather young relationship.
They had known each other for years but only got together in 1991 when each was coming out of divorce.
Dee invited John to attend a bat-research conference in Texas that first year they were together. They sat in bat seminars from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days. While this was not exactly a standard date for John, he was no stranger to the conservation-minded; his father had played a central role in a state wildlife service in saving the Garibaldi, California’s state fish.
But it was Zuri, a fruit-eating red bat owned by bat researcher Merlyn Tuttle, that cinched things for John. “He was just a great little guy,” Lockwood says. “Intense gaze, playful, incredibly sensitive. How could you not like him?”
Says Dee: “I knew he’d love bats. I knew I couldn’t be that far off.”
While John insists that neither he nor Dee are “cause people or political drum-beaters” of any stripe, Dee plainly says “bats gave us a mission.” Indeed, if they’re not pitching their own bat message, they’ll show up in interest and solidarity, as they did recently at a Barnes & Noble lecture, to hear naturalist Mashburn entrance an all-ages audience on bat reality, bat trivia, bat beneficence--and to meet “Rusty,” the charming pet red bat that hangs from Mashburn’s collar.
ON THE ROAD
The Lockwoods at this moment are somewhere in Canada, barely midway through a three-month, coast-to-coast tour in their motor home. Predictably, the giant lettering on the sides has expanded to three languages with this addition of Save the Bats:
SAUVEZ LES CHAUVE-SOURIS
Their peripatetic evangelism will not allow the full-service bat work they do here--where 24 species, dominated by the humble little brown bat, thrive. Last month, they were consulting with a Hidden Valley rancher about building bat houses that would consolidate and even increase bat populations for the purposes of insect protection, as well as taking the time to do show-and-tell lectures for schoolchildren.
For Canadians, it’s more on the fly: The Lockwoods will hand out BCI-supplied bat brochures and also have fellow travelers in to the motor home to watch a compelling bat video, also supplied by BCI.
Just as their busy lives at home are only partly claimed by bats, their trip isn’t entirely about bats. It’s about expanding the journey that bats helped set them upon in the first place: joint exploration.
Dee and John Lockwood will at some point end up in Goose Bay, Canada, where the trans-Canadian highway ends. That’s where they’ll put their fold-out boat into the water and commence a journey into deep interior Labrador in search of a memorial to a lost explorer who Dee had read about.
The trek will take them up a rough river and then on foot for 30 miles across trail-less, uninhabitable, boggy terrain boiling with the kind of black flies that bite for keeps. For any moose or bear on tour, Dee and John will appear as apparitions in white emergency response suits with vinyl windows sewn into the face netting--perfectly ridiculous creatures with darting eyes and strange ways.
In that setting, they will look at least as alarming as any bat has to man.
