Friday, Nov. 5, 2004 | 9:19 a.m.
They're hairy, leathery, fanged with wings, creepy in the movies and, to some, wretchedly scary on a darkened evening.
But give them a break, says Thomas Dyer, curator of exhibits at the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society, where its newest exhibit, "Bats! Champions of the Night Sky," returns to debunk common myths about bats.
"Bats are really fascinating," Dyer said. "Through echolocation, they can actually create a sound picture of their environment, a photo of the world around them."
More importantly, he said, "They make their living eating things that we don't want even more than we don't want bats. If we didn't have bats flying around at night, the insect population would be phenomenal.
"In the day they might be sleeping in the eaves of the house, in palm trees and nooks and crannies of bark. But you don't want to scare them away. If you do, you'll have more bugs than your neighbors."
Featuring roughly 20 freeze-dried bats, the exhibit is a second effort by the museum to defend and celebrate the nocturnal flying mammals, which hold 23 different species in the state.
The first exhibit, displayed at the museum for more than a year roughly 10 years ago, has been sitting in boxes since returning from a Carson City museum. After several inquiries, staffers dusted off the boxes, unpacked the bats and created a fun bat cave that celebrates a Gothic theme.
Also on display is a Victorian-themed sitting room that explores bat mythology by playing movies featuring the characters of Count Dracula and Batman.
But mostly, by providing text and photos of varying bats around the world, bat navigational skills and bats in their ecological roles, the exhibit looks at what bats are, where they come from and what they do. Bats can see, we learn. They don't suck blood. Vampire bats cut the skin of animals (particularly chicken and cattle) with their teeth and lick the blood as if they were lapping up milk or water.
Also, experts say, bats are no more rabid than chipmunks, dogs or cats.
"We're hoping to dispel a lot of the myths and a lot of fear," Dyer said. "People think they're flying mice that suck blood and get into your hair. You think they're chasing you, but they're really not. I'm sure a bat has gotten tangled in a person's hair because of the panic."
But, he said, "The majority of bats in the United States eat insects. Some of them catch fish out of the water. We have a lot of bats that eat fruits and pollens and bats that eat bats."
Silhouettes of the largest and smallest bats in the world are featured. The largest, a fruit bat native to Asia, has a 6 1/2-foot wingspan. The smallest is a bumblebee bat.
The exhibit also explores a bat's use of sound to navigate, ways we can listen to bat sounds and ways humans have learned from bats through bat echolocation.
Chris Tomlinson, wildlife biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, welcomes the exhibit as an education opportunity for Southern Nevadans to understand these creatures that share the environment.
"You got one person who loves them, the next person is not that way," said Tomlinson, whose department is often called by homeowners concerned about bats in attics or attached to stucco.
"We get those calls throughout the year," Tomlinson said. "We get them in attics. We ask them to wait until the bats leave in the evening, then seal up the holes. If they're paranoid, we try to help them remove the bat safely, what we call a passive removal where we catch the bat and move it to a safer area.
Mostly, Tomlinson said, "The bats prefer big concrete buildings and parking garages where it might be cool enough for them. A lot of times, people don't know that they're there."
To better understand bats in Nevada, Tomlinson said the Nevada Department of Wildlife is working with several agencies in an effort to understand bats through its Nevada Bat Plan.
"We're trying to get better long-term data on bats because we really don't know a lot about them," Tomlinson said. "We're trying to get a better picture of bats throughout the state and what they're doing throughout the year. We've got a high diversity of bats, probably the highest diversity in the Southwest because of the different biomes."
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