Bats are in trouble. They are dying off at a worrisome rate.

A fungus infection called white-nose syndrome is lethal to bats and spreading among bat populations in eastern North America. According to Federal wildlife biologist Mark McCollough, scientists are concerned that our brown bats in Maine could become extinct in 15 to 20 years. McCollough writes, “Bats are among our most useful wildlife. They consume great quantities of noxious insects such as mosquitoes and black flies. A bat eats its weight in insects each night, as many as 3,000 bugs each night!

What do YOU think about bats?

I’m not exactly afraid of them, though they are a little creepy, if you ask me. Sort of like snakes. Once, while high on a ladder repairing a camp roof, I suddenly came nose to nose with a napping bat. It squeaked. I gasped. It managed to get airborne and I managed to stay attached to the ladder. Another time, while at my Branch Lake camp, there came a knock at the door in the wee hours. The unexpected visitor was my Dad, who had a camp next door. A self-confessed bataphobic, he was wide-eyed and held a fishing net in a gloved hand. His head was covered with mosquito netting.

“Paul. can you come right over?” he asked.

“Sure, Dad. What’s up?” I asked through a haze of sleepiness.

“Bats. Two of them inside the camp,” he said with urgency. “I managed to get one to fly back out through the door, but the other one is flapping around behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. Your mother is hysterical!”

His message, by implication, was clear. Having had a bellyful of dreaded bats, he wanted me to carry on in the Branch Lake bat battle. A loyal son, I went to Dad’s camp. Mom, visibly upset, had a towel wrapped about her head. I assured her that the bat would not harm her and that she soon would be safely back in bed. Confronting the swooping, darting critter in my folks’ shower stall, it proved elusive. There was no choice. It was the bat or me. After terminating the intruder with a family-size bottle of Pert, I was seized by a boyish impulse. Call it a flashback to my favorite old movie days. (Stephen King was just a kid. Count Dracula was the rage then). Back to the bat battle.Coming out of the camp bathroom with a slight drool and my canine teeth bared like Vincent Price, I told my mother that the bat had nipped me on the neck and that I felt weird. I then snarled. She screamed. My father, who loved a practical joke, convulsed in laughter.

My mother, now 94, has finally forgiven me – I think.

Another time, at our old log camp at Pearl Pond, when my kids were young, a bat was doing 360s just below the rafters in the living area. Nobody could sleep. Kids were petrified. My wife expected me to intervene, which I did. Standing on the kitchen table wielding a large iron skillet, I studied the bat’s rhythmic flight pattern, woosh, woosh, woosh. BOING! On the 14th woosh, I had deftly slipped the skillet directly into the bat’s circular flight path. Radar failure. The bat crashed and burned and I, the Bat Warrior, became my family’s hero.

Massachusetts outdoor writer Randy Julius, who brags about his fearlessness when it comes to handling wild critters of any kind, once had the tables turned on him by a large and unpredictable South Shore bat. He captured with his bare hands a large bat that was terrorizing an elderly neighbor lady in the middle of the night. To impress the neighbor with his Jungle-Jim approach to wild critters, he held up the bat by the wings to show her how harmless it was. Randy then stepped outside to release the bat. The bat apparently took a liking to his captor. As Randy released the bat into the cool night air, it fluttered, did a quick 180 and immediately attached itself to Randy’s chest, just below the neck.

“Scared me half to death,” recalls Randy.

As McCollough points out, bats have been getting a bad rap over the centuries. Without them our spring bug season in Maine would be even worse than it is, and look at all of the good stories we would be without. If you have a good bat story, share it with someone. But not at bedtime.

Now shut up and drrrrink your blood…..

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The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”