When my oldest son Max was not even three years old, we would walk out into the backyard and wait for the bats to emerge. I would lie in the grass and he would lie right on top of me with his back upon my chest and we would look wide-eyed into the sky above. The bats would arrive, from the nearby roost in the attic and beneath the shutters, and put on an aerobatic performance in complete silence. Neither parent nor child ever failed to be captivated by this spectacle.

My own relationship with bats began at the street light in front of my home in my childhood. I would watch them dive and swoop through the party of moths that fluttered and danced in the light, capturing their snacks and meals. Later, at my grandparents’ house in Olympia, Washington, I would watch the bats swoop towards my toy bat when I tossed it into the air. As I grew older, I experimented by tossing small objects into the air near feeding bats, sometimes fooling them and soliciting a sudden maneuver toward my decoy food. As a teenager there was nothing quite like surfacing during a night swim only to be greeted by a swooping bat.

I have never lost my fascination with bats and have discovered that many children share this interest with me. This summer has been full of bats. At the J. Seward Johnson Environmental Center at the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, a decent-sized roost provides the opportunity for me to share the passion of bat watching with others, young and old. During our annual family bat watch, we watched bats emerge from the roost, listened with a bat detector to their feeding calls, and laid in the grass, watching their feeding antics through dusk. We visited the roost with our summer campers, staking out the whole building and counting carefully the number of bats emerging from the various shutters and spaces beneath the roof. We counted 91 bats! This memorable experience not only introduced these students to the wonders of bats but also involved them with some data gathering as the folks at Conserve Wildlife NJ are trying to get a clear picture of New Jersey’s at risk bat population.

It is clear that with bats, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. With their turned up nose and elfish ears, some find them adorable while many lean more towards hideous. When my young staff at our Nature Camp found a sick bat on the ground, they did not hesitate to suggest it needed some sort of help - we took this bat, very carefully, to the Mercer County Wildlife Center for care. If you are having trouble seeing the beauty in a bat, head outside at dusk for a bat watch. Try the backyard or a nearby park and watch patiently. While it may be unnerving to see bats flying overhead or swooping towards you to grab that mosquito, you will, sooner or later discover the undeniable beauty in their aerial ballet.