The sight is breathtaking. Thousands of huge bats, their graceful wings spanning three feet or more, sail directly overhead. Waves of grey-headed flying foxes, their bodies silhouetted against the deep-purple sky, rise from the surrounding forest at dusk and fly low over the handful of BCI members gathered on a bridge across a deep gorge at Australia’s Ku-ring-gai Bat Reserve. “This,” says Les Meade of Lexington, Kentucky, “is the second-best emergence of bats that I have ever seen. Number One is...more

Experience the unforgettable sight of 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats emerging at twilight from Bracken Cave. Listen for the soft flapping of countless wings as the world’s largest bat colony spends hours swirling up out of the cave. Vast columns of bats, preyed upon by hawks and owls, disperse over the rugged Hill Country of Central Texas. By the time they return at dawn, these bats will have eaten some 200 tons of insects, many of them pests that attack farm crops of the region. ...more

Bats “are considered nature’s pesticides since they consume thousands of insects each night,” says public radio station KSMU at Missouri State University. But of the 16 bat species in Missouri, two are listed as endangered: the gray myotis and the Indiana myotis. As part of KSMU’s Endangered Species Series...more