Spending a night with the bats at Beaver Creek

You might not see them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Many creatures in Saskatchewan are active exclusively during the night, and the Meewasin Valley Authority (MVA) was doing its part on Saturday to teach youngsters all about our nocturnal neighbours.

“I find that people are scared of things they don’t understand,” Kenton Lysak, senior interpreter with the MVA, said. “The more that they learn about these species, the better that they can have a more intimate connection with them.”

Lysak was leading Saturday’s event at Beaver Creek called Dark Skies at the Creek. The fifth-annual day and evening excursion invited people to get up close and personal with Batrick and Elizabat, two big brown bats from the Living Sky Wildlife Rehabilitation Society.

After being able to hold the bats and learn all about the furry creatures, People were invited to build small bat boxes of their own before moving on to an evening program that included night hikes, educational sky gazing and listening to a local astronomer about our night sky and why it’s worth protecting.

One thing Lysak wasn’t about to teach eager listeners was exact locations of nature’s only flying mammal.

“The truth is, we don’t have an understanding of where bats are hibernating, where they’re moving, where the ebbs and flows are in Saskatoon,” Lysak said. “We know there’s hot spots, places like Spadina Drive, McKercher Drive and places in the university area.

“Bats like old buildings.”

A large component of the day focused on light pollution and how it harms local bat populations.

Lysak said bats are either drawn into the light created from expanding cities, where they are quickly confused after chasing around insects gathered around light sources, and twirl to the ground.

“A bat doesn’t do that well on the ground,” Lysak said.

Another concern for researchers and scientists is the slow disappearance of old abandoned buildings across the prairies like barns and farmhouses that have been forgotten over time.

With no caves around to hibernate in, many of Saskatchewan’s bats depend on these old buildings to survive.

With many children in the audience, Lysak was also tasked with removing the spooky factor from the equation.

While popular media suggests bats are frightening, that may not be the case.

“Bats are not a short-lived species. They’re not mice with wings, and they’re extremely intelligent,” Lysak said.

Big brown bats common across North America eat roughly 1,200 mosquitoes every hour, live to be 30-years-old and often weigh just 15 grams.

Of course, bats are not blind. They use echolocation to shoot soundwaves that hit an object, which produces echoes to give a bat a picture of its surroundings.

“I think bats got a bad rap,” Lysak said. “If more people understood just how important their role is in our ecosystem, I think more people would really understand they’re worth protecting.”

Lysak added there are over 1,300 species of bats in the world. Three of them are vampire bats and even those ones aren’t particularly interested in humans.