
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 1, 1990                   TAG: 9006010075
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: NATURAL BRIDGE                                 LENGTH: Medium

LEARNING CENTER FINDS NO EASY FIX FOR BATTY TOOLSHED

Everybody at the Natural Bridge Learning Center has known for years that there are bats in the toolshed. Guano - bat droppings - drips from the rafters onto shelves, workbenches and the floor. The bats chirp during the day, take to the skies at night.

Everyone figured it was a small colony of bats, perhaps a couple of hundred. And everyone figured they were some garden-variety bat, perhaps big brown bats, among Virginia's most common species.

The bats are an attractive nuisance to the teen-age residents at the learning center, a home for youthful first-time criminal offenders. Bats under attack by zealous teens have bitten their assailants a couple of times over the years.

But the folks who run the center don't want to kill the winged critters. Bats are among nature's most voracious munchers of insects and here on a cleared 100-acre tract on the edge of the Jefferson National Forest, flocks of gnats form clouds of black fog.

So the learning center and the U.S. Forest Service, which owns the land, called in Marvin Johnson of the Mill Mountain Zoo. Johnson knows his bats, and he is a frequent speaker on the rubber-chicken circuit singing the praises of, and plotting to gently nudge away, flying mammals.

Johnson visited on Wednesday and gave his stock bat speech, railing against the undeservedly bad public image that bats have. He passed around a live bat for people to pet.

"This is not a pterodactyl," he said, a spin doctor at work. "It does not have 8-foot wings. It is not going to carry children or dogs back to a cave and eat them."

Johnson handed out construction designs for a simple bat house that could be used to lure the resident bats from the toolshed into more suitable quarters.

Ah, if only life were so simple.

Johnson, his thirst for bat topics unquenched, scrambled up a ladder in the toolshed to have a look.

"Oh," he called down to the uplifted faces far below. "You've got a lot of bats up here. You've got a lot of bats here."

There weren't a couple of hundred bats. There were a couple thousand, maybe more.

And these were not, Johnson thought, ordinary big brown bats.

These might be Indiana bats, or Virginia big-eared bats, he said, his voice electrified by the tension that only a bat-lover could feel in such a situation.

Both types are on the federal endangered species list.

We live in exciting times.

But for the Virginia Department of Corrections, which just wants the bats out of the toolshed, it could be the start of a very painful headache.

One does not roust endangered bats from a toolshed without following specific guidelines, established by Congress, and promulgated by several million years' worth of bureaucracy.

It may be easier to build a new toolshed and leave the old building for the bats.

Marvin Johnson collected the mummified remains of a bat he found, fortuitously, in a doorjamb, and is consulting true bat experts to determine the species.

Meanwhile, you can use the toolshed if you want.

But stay low.

by CNB