Years before Val Kilmer or Michael Keaton perspired profusely in tight, black rubber suits and silky masks with pointy ears, Merlin Tuttle would have had no trouble waxing eloquent about bat heroics.
He would have noted that the often-feared mammals have saved farmers’ crops from devastation by insects and that they are leaders in the restoration of tropical rainforests. He might have mentioned that an anticoagulant from the saliva of the common vampire bat may soon be used to treat human heart patients and that these mammals even have family values.
And he most certainly would have pointed out that, no, they don’t flit about looking for just the right spot to snarl themselves in your hair, nor do they spread the plague. They are not blind and definitely are not flying rats.
Tuttle, 53, knows all that because he is considered the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, foremost expert on bats, a status he has earned through public relations battles and bumps, bruises and brushes with death during his nearly four decades of research on them.
He established Bat Conservation International 13 years ago, has written nearly 50 articles and one book on bats, starred in an award-winning documentary, “The Secret World of Bats,” led the charge to place the mammals on the endangered species list and, lately–like his winged, nocturnal friends–Merlin Tuttle is hot.
A behavioral ecologist and wildlife photographer, he is the scientific consultant on the Field Museum’s latest, popular exhibit, “Masters of the Night, The True Story of Bats.” He is the author and photographer of a 22-page article on bats in the August issue of National Geographic and has just returned from a cave near Monterrey, Mexico, working to re-establish what he said may have been the world’s largest bat population.
He’s also about two-thirds of the way finished writing what is expected to be the definitive guide to bats in North America, plus a coffee table version of the same publication. And he’s doing interviews, lots of interviews.
“My staff keeps telling me I’m going to die of cancer or something if I don’t try and slow down,” Tuttle said with a drawl that recalls his years in Tennessee and Texas. “I just tell `em, `Believe me, if that happens and I’m dying, that last year I’ll raise more money than you’ve ever seen.’ “
He laughs, which Tuttle does quite easily and often–probably a critical reason for the auspicious movement upward in bat popularity. Behind the easy grin is an ardent conservationist whose seminars include sessions on how to avoid conflicts and still win environmental battles.
The son of a biology teacher father and a mother who also taught school and ran health food stores, Tuttle’s fascination with nature began at a young age. By his early teens, he was practicing falconry and hunting with hawks.
Those hobbies led him to investigate shrews and then bats, which he calls “an excellent fascination for the scientist because they are so poorly studied and so incredibly sophisticated.” Even today, the vast majority of the nearly 1,000 bat species have not been studied beyond simply identifying them as species.
After graduating from Andrews University near Berrien Springs, Mich., he earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Kansas University and landed a job as curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum. He formed Bat Conservation International in March 1982 after discerning that bat populations were dropping substantially but conservation groups perceived them as too ugly and unpopular to rally around and protect.
With $6,000 from a kindred couple at the museum, Tuttle hired a part-time secretary and began giving slide shows in his spare time, while continuing what had already become substantial research on bats. The next year, he received national media publicity for, among other things, articles he wrote disproving widely held notions about bats, and in general, the novelty of forming an organization to promote bats.
There was an article in National Geographic and a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal. BCI’s membership grew while attracting major benefactors.
Panic in Austin
By 1986, Tuttle got word that Austin, Texas, was panic-stricken over an influx of hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats that had made their home under a downtown bridge. Citizens were demanding the bats’ extermination, and state officials began considering measures to evict the mammals.
In what may be one of the greatest marketing gambles of all time, Tuttle moved BCI’s headquarters to Austin that year. He said he figured that with that many bats in one city, it wouldn’t take him long to convince the populace of their value.
It worked. Now Austin calls itself the “Bat Capital of America,” and the movement of bats from under the bridge at dusk has become something of a tourist attraction. In addition, the Texas Department of Transportation is planning to design more bat-friendly bridges.
Along the way, BCI’s profile steadily grew. By 1987, membership climbed to 3,000 with a budget of about $400,000. Today BCI includes nearly 13,000 members in 56 countries and its budget totals about $1.5 million. It employs a staff of 17.
Those people, including Tuttle, have become adept at getting out the message. The organization publishes a quarterly magazine, and its own catalog, from which one can purchase bat videos, bat baseball caps and T-shirts, a bat tie-tack, even an ultrasound bat detector. Enthusiasts also can adopt a bat for $15 a year.
As for Tuttle, he is a very busy batman.
This summer, for example, he has traveled to Mexico and a few other places in the Southwest to monitor bat populations, taught bat appreciation workshops in Arizona and then hit the speaking and media interview circuit. Upon returning to Austin in late July, he spent a week preparing for the trip to Mexico, then worked near Monterrey before returning to Arizona to teach a field workshop on bats. The month of August will finish with an international meeting on bats in Boston and his teaching of three more workshops in Pennsylvania.
There is much to teach, Tuttle insists, and much unknown about bats, even by him.
Perhaps the most impressive fact about the mammals is their ability to consume insects, including many species of crop pests. A colony of 150 big brown bats, which could easily live in a back-yard bat house, can protect a farmer from 18 million or more rootworms. Bats also eat potato beetles and corn-borer moths.
And how’s this for mosquito abatement: A single brown bat, one of North America’s most abundant species, can eat 600 of the tiny buzzers in an hour.
In addition, bats living in tropical rainforests can spread 60,000 seeds in a night. The first trees and shrubs to grow on cleared rainforest land are those whose seeds are spread by bats.
Male bats guard their pups and harems. Often, when a mother bat loses an offspring, she joins another mother and helps nurse her young bat.
Of guano and bombs
Just as intriguing as what’s inside bats is what comes out. Guano, that exotic-sounding name for what in this context is bat poop, contains enzymes that have been sold to detergent companies to improve their products.
Guano bacteria also produce enzymes that break down ammonia, a major pollutant of rivers and lakes, and an enzyme that deteriorates insect skeletons. That characteristic could lead to the production of non-toxic pesticides.
In another example of bat heroics, the U.S. military drafted bats during World War II to use as a sort of mammal version of kamikaze pilots.
The U.S. Air Force formulated a plan to strap incendiary bombs on bats and then drop the animals over Japan . Tests were conducted in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, but the Air Force scrapped the plan.
Through the years of shadowing bats, Tuttle has collected enough adventures to fill two or three Indiana Jones sequels. He has also taken about 100,000 bat photographs, 24 of which accompany this month’s National Geographic story.
He has been stalked by a tiger, charged by an elephant and surrounded by bandits in Africa. He has lived with cannibal tribes in Venezuela, where his exploration party was mistaken for a band of communist guerrillas and almost strafed by military jets.
And then there was the time in 1983 when he was hospitalized for 10 days with ammonia poisoning after using a faulty respirator mask while photographing Mexican free-tailed bats in a Texas cave.
Just last spring, he fell eight feet, head first, while working in the Yucatan Peninsula. The force of his fall caused ligaments to pull substantial chunks of bone from his legs.
“Both my legs from hip to ankle were swollen and every color of the rainbow,” he said, laughing.
He was supposed to rest for six weeks, but made it to Washington, D.C., to testify, on crutches, in support of a conservation program two weeks after the fall.
All of his efforts, and those of the well-oiled machine that is his staff, are making a difference. The traveling “Masters of the Night” exhibit, for example, is drawing more than 34,000 visitors a month. “Masters” closes Sept. 4 and moves to Buffalo.
“It’s really hard to say, but we have had such a huge impact on changing people’s perceptions about bats that we may have come close to stabilizing the bat population,” Tuttle said.
He noted that the organization’s work has helped specific species, including the gray bat, which was nearly extinct in 1974 and now numbers more than a million. In addition, BCI bought Bracken Cave, near Austin, to help preserve a colony of 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats.
But imposing tasks remain. Six of the 44 bat species in the U.S. are endangered while 18 others are candidates for endangered status. Those figures, Tuttle said, place bats as the most endangered land mammals in the United States.
He has plans to respond, though. The more workshops he leads–and he is booked solid for months–the more people learn the value of bats. Next year, BCI will have a national network of bat experts on the internet to exchange information and provide help for bats.
“I am looking forward to the day when the bat conservation movement will be independent enough of me to permit me to do more book writing and things like that where I would make a bigger, long-term difference,” he said.
Hard to imagine that.
Bat Conservation International can be reached at P.O. Box 162603, Austin, Texas, 78716.
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