Washington Naturalists Go to Bat for Waning Species

Under a nearly full moon and a battery-powered lantern, John Fleckenstein gingerly opens a canvas bag. A small, very annoyed bat tumbles into his gloved hand.

It’s flashing sharp teeth, struggling to escape. Fleckenstein keeps a firm but gentle grip.

Fleckenstein determines species, sex and approximate age--juvenile or adult. He measures its forearm and rolls the bat carefully in a woman’s knee-high nylon stocking. He then dangles the bundle from a hand-held scale. Typical weight for a big brown bat: 20 grams, less than seven-tenths of an ounce.

The whole checkup, conducted on the tailgate of Fleckenstein’s state Department of Natural Resources pickup, takes less than five minutes. Then he invites the big brown to disappear, but now it’s disinclined. “He’s cold,” says Fleckenstein.

Eventually the bat does take wing, and Fleckenstein and two colleagues, Neal Hedges and Ron Friesz, take off too, heading back to the creek bed a few yards away to check their nets. These bat enthusiasts, employed by state and federal natural resource management agencies, are surveying the population and assessing the habitat at Moses Coulee.

Thirteen of Washington’s 15 bat species, including the rare spotted bat, hang here for at least part of the year. They live among steep basalt cliffs and devour an abundant variety of flying insects.

“It’s sort of a bat heaven out there,” says Curt Soper, director of conservation programs for the Nature Conservancy.

In 1998, the nonprofit conservation group purchased the preserve --some 3,600 acres of the state’s most spectacular shrub-steppe landscape. “People think of it as a wasteland, scrubland or desert,” says Soper, “but it’s very vibrant and very alive and very beautiful.”

It’s also what bats need: a good- quality habitat, river country with plenty of fresh water, cliffs to roost on and vegetation that supports the insects they devour.

The three naturalists set up a half-dozen fine-gauge nets along the creek bed out of Dutch Henry Falls to trap bats en route to a drink of water. “Being around bats isn’t scary,” offers Fleckenstein as reassurance. “If it was, we’d all be scared all the time--because bats are everywhere.”

Literally. For those living west of the Cascades, a bat is never more than 50 feet away. For those living east, it’s 200 feet.

Bats Northwest, an education and advocacy group based in Seattle, estimates that bats all over the world are in trouble, including 40% of species in the United States. Worldwide, bats--the most numerous mammal group except for rodents--come in more than a thousand species.

In Washington, the state Department of Wildlife lists nine species “of special concern,” and the federal government lists eight as candidates for protection.

In Eastern Washington, those include bats spotted or pallid and myotis fringed or small-footed. West of the Cascades, they include Townsend’s big-eared bat and myotis, long-eared or long-legged.

The arrival of people and the loss of habitat, such as the closure of old mines in some parts of the United States, can be threatening. Though bats live as long as 20 or 30 years, they reproduce slowly-- usually one baby each year.

Washington’s bats feed at night. Even the vampires, found in Latin America, don’t actually suck blood. They scratch the skin of an animal, often cows, and lap blood, helped by an anticoagulant in their saliva.

Bats prefer bugs, finding them by echolocation, an internal sonar-type system, and chowing down on several thousand mosquitoes a night. On a hand-held ultrasound “bat detector,” the sound waves are similar to the clicks that some whales use to communicate.

Despite rabid bats spotted last year in southwestern Washington and in the governor’s mansion in Olympia (first lady Mona Lee Locke and baby Emily got rabies shots), Fleckenstein dismisses any notion that bats are a problem for the state.

Most bats, he says, are healthy --and helpful. He knows of at least one orchardist in the Northwest who relies on them to control pests.

“Bats,” he says, “do a big service.”