Bats in the belfry.

I was sitting at the dinner table in the hotel restaurant after a long day of meetings in Romanian, lost in thought, when Anda plopped down next to me and said hello.  Anda is an IMPACT leader from Cluj-Napoca, a high school biology teacher who is passionate about the subject she teaches, the kids she works with, and the potential for these youth to change the broken systems she sees all around Romania.  She’s amazing and inspiring and delightful to talk to.

She’s also into bats.

So we talked about bats for most of dinner.  Being a biologist’s daughter myself, I find science an interesting topic for dinner discussion regardless of its grossn factor, though my interest in bats is admittedly tainted by an experience as a 13-year-old of having a bat fly into my room at night and dive-bomb my head… an experience which ended in me racing, shrieking, out of my room while my dad caught the bat in a butterfly net and put it overnight in the freezer.  But that’s another story.

Apparently Romania has over 30 species of bats, many of which are endangered.   Part of the problem is that many of these bats spend the summer in inhabited buildings, especially churches.  Anda said it’s mostly pregnant mother bats who then raise their “adorable babies” (her words, not mine) in the belfries and attics and steeples, migrating to caves or other locales to hibernate when the weather turns colder.  The presence of these bats should make us grateful, she reminded me – after all, they eat all sorts of pests, helping protect our crops and save us all from more mosquito bites.  But because they eat so much, they also poop a lot – and their guano accumulates in the attics of beautiful old Orthodox churches, slowly seeping through and ruining the intricate icons painted on the ceilings.  It smells, it ruins that which humans are trying to preserve, and bats simply scare people – and thus, many times, they are just gassed.  Entire colonies are killed at once, Anda said, and because bats reproduce very slowly (apparently they only have one baby per year), a colony which is gassed will never, ever recover.

So Anda and her team of fellow Romanian bat-loving biologists have made this their summer project.  The work is three-fold.  First, they do on-site assessments of the churches and other buildings with bat infestations, figuring out what remodeling work will need to be done to protect the building’s treasures and inhabitants without removing or harming the colony of bats.  This often involves laying new layers of insulation in attics, changing ventilation systems, and so on.  They do the assessments themselves but hire local workers to actually do the work, thus putting money into local economies and giving local residents expertise in this domain.  Second, they do the science – that is, they monitor the bat population all summer: counting how many bats fly in and out of the belfry, timing their arrival in the spring, tracking births and population changes and all sorts of other data.  It’s an important part of saving these endangered populations.  Third, the biologists do public education.  They bring school kids into the attic and let them touch a bat and see how cute it is; they talk to priests and explain the importance of the situation; they hold meetings with congregations to discuss misconceptions about bats and the necessity of their work.  And before they finish, they empower a team of locals to continue the work: to keep learning, to be a support, and to watch the bats with sympathetic eyes as they swoop into town each year with the arrival of summer.

Cool.