Bat Populations Still in Decline
August 17, 2011
Leslie Sturges, director of a conservation group called Bat World NOVA, holds a bat
As sunlight fades from the evening sky, Leslie Sturges checks on a colony of bats she has been monitoring.
The bats gather at the portals of their summer homes - these wooden bat boxes hung on a pole in a suburban park.
One by one, the small brown bats take flight into darkness, hunting for insects and small bugs.
But Sturges says she's concerned that her count reveals only half the number of bats as last year. She hopes some have made an early return to the cave where they hibernate in winter.
"You know my hope is that a lot of the colony already moved out," said Sturges. "But I can't be that optimistic as far as bats are concerned in the Mid-Atlantic."
Sturges is director of a conservation group called Bat World NOVA. She cares for injured and orphaned bats here in her basement. Then she releases them back to the wild.
Bat populations are declining worldwide, mostly because of habitat destruction and overuse of pesticides. Sturges says common fears that bats will fly into your hair, or that all bats carry the deadly rabies virus also contribute to human intolerance of bat populations.
"A lot of people refer to bats as filthy," she said. "But they aren't. They groom like cats and dogs do. They use these toes back here to actually comb their fur out."
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