Only 30 people showed up the last time Laura Stastny released a large group of captured big brown bats back into the wild.
“It's never struck me that the public would want to be interested,” she said.
But there she was, at dusk on Wednesday, surrounded by more than 200 people (many of them wide-eyed, squealing children). They crowded around the trunk of a Mazda sedan to catch a glimpse of the approximately 200 bats stashed inside.
The operations chair of Nebraska Wildlife Rehab was a little overwhelmed.
“This is a lot of people!” she said.
Every fall and winter, Stastny and her team harvest bats found inside local buildings and move them to a shelter to provide warmth and food through the cold-weather months. In the spring, volunteers release the bats into the night sky and let them find their way back to their old habitats.
Stastny had never promoted the event before, but she asked the Joslyn Art Museum if she could use its parking lot in case a few extra people showed up to see the leathery-winged creatures take flight.
“They told me it was the most unusual facilities request they ever had,” she said.
Word of the event then spread through social networking sites and the news.
People came, drawn by curiosity and a warm spring night, including Emma Mulhall. She's an 18-year-old senior at Duschene Academy whose love for a certain nocturnal animal earned her the nickname “Bat Girl.”
“They're probably the most misunderstood animal, besides sharks,” Mulhall said. “But they're kind of cute.
“I find them adorable, kind of like mice with wings.”
A girl in the crowd, younger than 10, had a decidedly less enthusiastic reaction:
“I hate bats,” she told a volunteer. “They scare me.”
After all, bats are often seen as the disease-ridden flotsam of the night sky. Rabies can be a concern with a small part of the bat population, Stastny said, but they're normally clean creatures that provide an essential service to an ecosystem: They're nature's pest-control squad.
A colony of 150 bats can prevent 33 million root worms from hatching in a summer, she said. They also eat hordes of mosquitoes and other pesky insects, plenty of which were in the air on Wednesday night.
And, as the sky darkened, the bats sprang free. They swooped low overhead, flapped high into the air and circled the parking lot as the audience cheered and snapped photos.
It may be a couple of days before the bats return to their habitats, Stastny said.
But they'll be there in time for summer and ready to feed.
Contact the writer:
444-1068, johnny.perez@owh.com
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
