Woman Goes to Bat for Misunderstood Mammal

For the record, a bat is more closely related to a human being than it is to a rat.

And while the relation is about as distant as distant can be, it’s a little factoid that Kris Mashburn feels the public should know.

Particularly if they feel the need to arm themselves with brooms, tennis rackets and poison sprays the next time a wayward bat wanders into their house.

Adorned with silver rings and other ornamental trinkets embossed with images of the winged creatures, Mashburn is on a mission to bleach the bat’s stained reputation as being a disease-riddled, blood-sucking denizen of the night.

“It’s a real shame,” said Mashburn, a naturalist at McGrath State Beach in Oxnard. “It’s a crying shame these little guys don’t get the credit they deserve, especially when it’s so hard to imagine living in a world where there aren’t any.”

Though friends and co-workers might use cliches like “she’s got bats in her belfry” or “she’s a bit batty” when describing the longtime Ojai resident, Mashburn’s affection for the meek mammal runs deep, and while admittedly a bit off-kilter, is genuine.

As a naturalist for the park, Mashburn, 43, hosts an interpretive program every Saturday night that introduces campers to the benevolent world of bats. She also visits classrooms and libraries throughout the county with her program.

In addition to highlighting the important role bats play in the ecosystem, she seeks to dispel tales about sucking the blood from sleeping babies and infecting people with horrific diseases like rabies.

In fact, as Mashburn notes, there is only one blood-sucking species--the vampire bat--which drinks about a teaspoon of blood a day, usually from livestock, and is found only in South America.

And as for rabies, she said that myth isn’t even worth its weight in guano.

“More people in the world are infected with rabies from other people than they are from bats,” she said.

The Ventura County Animal Control Department said bats do still present a danger, however small, of spreading disease.

Officials said many have tested positive for rabies, and they ask that residents call the department if they find one helpless on the ground or caught by a pet.

As Mashburn tells it, she’s always rooted for the underdog.

As a child, when other girls were going gaga for puppies and ponies, Mashburn stayed busy with her snails and fed her interest in snakes with esoteric books on herpetology.

Her bond with bats, however, developed much later after a visit to Zion National Park with her family.

It was there in the early 1980s when Mashburn took in an interpretive program about the area’s native flora and fauna.

After sitting for about an hour learning about desert cactus and horny toads, she listened as the ranger said there was no animal more despised than the bat.

Mashburn was love struck.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “They looked so cute, so after that I started reading about them and learning about what they were really like.”

What she found ran completely opposite to conventional wisdom.

Rather than being malevolent little devils with a penchant for the warm plasma of newborns, bats are an ecological linchpin and testament to evolutionary diversity.

For instance, according to Bat Conservation International, if all bat species were to become extinct today, people would find themselves overwhelmed by crawling, biting insects such as mosquitoes.

The annual blooms that color the deserts of eastern California are also the work of bats, who feed off the sweet nectar of such plants as chollo and pollinate them in the process.

And--for lovers of trivia--bats have the finest hair of any animal on earth, and Malaysians have been known to flavor their food with bat guano.

“Eating the guano of an insectivore won’t hurt you,” she said. “But the thought of it sounds pretty disgusting.”

Not long after her fascination with the animals took off, Mashburn started the bat show and earned a reputation as an expert on the palm-sized creatures.

Strangers would call her out of the blue to say they had a bat in their attic or found one on the ground and wanted to know how to handle the situation.

One man who caught her show at McGrath called from his home in Arizona to say he’d found a bat in the swimming pool and would be plagued with guilt if he didn’t do anything.

Delighted to know her effort to illustrate bats in their true colors was working, Mashburn told the man: Take it out and let it dry and then leave it alone.

“It’s that kind of feedback that lets me know I’m having an impact,” she said.

It’s hard not to come away with some respect for the bat after seeing one of her programs.

Armed with a laundry list of facts, volumes of slides, an uncanny enthusiasm for the subject, and a bat named Milo, Mashburn delights her audiences, some of whom return year after year.

Jessica Covell, a bubbly 6-year-old on a weeklong vacation at McGrath with her family from Fresno, said she always thought bats were “gross.”

But after meeting Milo and learning that all most bats do is eat bugs that are “super gross,” she cleared some space in her heart.

“He’s little like a hamster, and I think he can smile, too,” Jessica said.

With an education degree from Cal State Northridge, Mashburn sees her bat show as an attempt to educate others about the unique creatures. She has more bat books, she said, than most libraries.

Ventura County’s forested hinterlands are home to 12 bat species.

They are all insect eaters and generally steer clear of humans, but it isn’t uncommon for them to be spotted hanging in the attics of homes.

The Ventura Keys, once a favored bat habitat, has one of the greatest suburban bat concentrations of any area in the county, she said.

Mashburn said she gets calls all the time from residents who have learned they have a few living beneath the eaves or inside a vent.

And while removing them is an option, she said leaving them is also fine and, in some cases, better.

“All they need is 3 to 4 inches of space to sleep,” Mashburn said. “And they won’t chew through the insulation or wires and they won’t poop on the floor.”

But, she cautioned against trying to make a pet out of them.

“They’re very finicky,” Mashburn said.

With the new school year just kicking into gear, Mashburn said she will remain busy introducing young and old to bats in hopes that a little education will help save them and their habitat.

“People seem to get really interested in them, which doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “It’s a fun topic that’s just odd enough to get their attention.”

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FYI

Kris Mashburn’s hourlong interpretive presentation on bats can be seen free of charge every Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Campfire Theater at McGrath State Beach off Harbor Boulevard in Oxnard.