Source(s):
Ken Gioeli ktg@mail.ifas.ufl.edu, 772-462-1660
FORT PIERCE, Fla. —Costume? Check. Candy? Check. Bat detector and hiking boots? Check and check.
Welcome to Halloween in St. Lucie County, where a University of Florida wildlife expert plans to take hundreds of revelers on a midnight ramble through the woods in search of the holiday’s unofficial mascot – the bat.
“A lot of people seem to be afraid of bats, but there’s no reason to be,” said Ken Gioeli, a wildlife extension agent with UF’s Institute of Food an Agricultural Sciences. “They don’t go around biting people on the neck. And since they eat insects, you might even consider them beneficial.”
Armed with a bat detector – a small electronic device that can pick up the inaudible sounds bats use to find their prey – Gioeli can track down a swarm of the flying mammals on the darkest of moonless nights. He can even tell one species of bat from another, simply by hearing a bat’s call.
He regularly takes groups of local residents on nocturnal tours of South Florida bat-havens, hoping to improve relations between humans and one of nature’s most misunderstood animals – and he expects a crowd of hundreds for a Halloween bat hunt on the grounds of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce.
In his day job, Gioeli teaches St. Lucie County residents how to cope with “urban wildlife” – the wild animals that manage to find a place to call home among Florida’s sprawling suburbs. Bats definitely fit in that category, occasionally roosting by the thousands in sports stadiums or parking decks. Those colonies can occasionally cause headaches for building owners, mostly because of the droppings the bats leave behind.
But for the most part, Gioeli says, the public has given bats a bad rap.
“I’ve heard people complain, for instance, that bats are eating the fruit in their gardens,” Gioeli said. “There’s no way that could happen, since all the bat species in Florida are insect eaters.”
And then there’s surprisingly common fear of getting bats in your hair. Gioeli says people on his bat tours often ask about the possibility of getting bats tangled in their hair, a fear apparently inspired by old horror movies.
“A bat isn’t going to be interested in your hair unless your hair is full of bugs,” he said. “But people swear by this. They’re convinced it’s something they need to watch out for.”
Gioeli says October is peak season for his bat tours, with crowds swelling around Halloween – another sign of the persistence of the legends surrounding bats.
The furry, winged creatures are abundant in Florida, and Gioeli says it’s not uncommon to detect several different species of bat on a single outing. Typically those bats are hard to spot in the night sky; contrary to popular belief, most Florida bats are tiny, with bodies roughly the size of your thumb.
But they’re easy to pick up with bat detectors, which convert the bats’ inaudible sonar-like calls into sounds the human ear can hear. As heard through the bat detector, most bats make sounds like an early-1980’s video game – beeping, chirping and clacking. A crowd favorite, Gioeli said, is the silver-haired bat, with a call that consists of a series of clicks followed by a raspberry-like sound.
“Kids love that one,” Gioeli said.
It may sound like something a superhero carries on his utility belt, but the bat detector is an old standby for biologists and amateur bat-watchers hoping to locate the flying mammals. The detectors allow biologists to count the number of bats in an area without catching them in nets – an old counting method that can sometimes injure bats.
Most bat detectors are about the size of cellular phones, and look like simple hand-held radios. They have one major drawback: they sometimes pick up unwanted sounds, such as the buzz of a light bulb or a high-pitched tone often emitted by car alarms in standby mode. Researchers have also reportedly used them to document the sounds made by rats.
Bat fanciers can buy the detectors online for prices ranging from $70 to upwards of $1,000, and many hard-core bat hobbyists build their own, using instructions available on the Internet. Gioeli currently has four of them – but he admits he’s a relative newcomer to bat-hunting.
It all started in 1998, when Gioeli was asked to help the New York Mets evict 30,000 Mexican free-tailed bats from the stadium at the Mets’ spring training complex at Port St. Lucie. The bats couldn’t stay, because their droppings were creating a serious problem for sanitation workers – and vendors – at the stadium.
“Bat droppings were falling into the bleachers and making a mess,” he said.
As a wildlife expert for the UF extension service, Gioeli had advised people on bat problems before, but he wasn’t a bat specialist. He directed the Mets management to Minnesota bat-removal specialist Marshall Hanks, who installed a series of nets and funnels that allowed bats to leave their roosting places, but prevented them from coming back. St. Lucie County also built a “bat house” to serve as a new home for 15,000 of the bats.
Gioeli oversaw the bat removal, and gave interviews about the bat problem to reporters from around the country. Before long, Gioeli found his phone ringing off the hook with calls from people around the world who were in need of a bat exorcist.
“After all that coverage, people started thinking of me as the bat expert,” he said. “I’ve gotten calls from as far away as Japan.”
Gioeli has since tried to live up to the reputation, doing research on blood-sucking bats and their effect on cattle in Costa Rica as part of his work toward a master’s degree from UF.
He says he wants to get out the word that there’s nothing creepy about bats – or about the people who are fascinated by them.
“I’ve heard all the jokes,” Gioeli said. “I’ve heard ‘he’s got bats in his belfry’ and all the other puns. But basically I’m just a normal guy who happens to have a lot of bat detectors.”
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