Merlin Tuttle, bat scientist and founder of Bat Conservation International (1982), debunks myths like rabid bat attacks—only 0.5% of wild bats carry rabies—and reveals bats’ vital roles: Brazilian free-tailed colonies of 20M control pests, reducing pesticide use in rice paddies by 30%, while pollinating night-blooming flowers like macuna. His global work, spanning 45 countries, highlights their endangered status due to slow reproduction (one pup/year) and human persecution fueled by fear, not aggression; vampire bats bite only in reckless encounters, never in Romania. Now leading Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation, he urges donations to combat misinformation and protect declining populations, framing bats as unsung heroes of ecosystems. [Automatically generated summary]
My mother actually named me Merlin DeVere, and her hope was that she would get a kick out of me being a medical doctor, M.D. Tuttle M.D. But it didn't work out that way.
We moved into a new neighborhood one time, and a welcoming committee came over to welcome my mother to the neighborhood.
And I had a few days before caught a 7-foot, 8-inch Coach Whip snake that I was really proud of, but it got out.
And we couldn't find it in the house.
We thought it had gotten out of the house.
The group's sitting around welcoming my mother to the neighborhood, and all of a sudden she sees everybody with a look of horror on their faces, and they're heading for the door.
And this snake had reared up behind the couch and was looking for all the world like a cobra looking around.
And only one of those women would ever even speak to my mother again.
Actually, I moved to Austin because there are a lot of bats here, but there wouldn't be probably still a lot of bats if it hadn't been for my moving.
When I first began to be interested in conserving bats, Austin was making more negative publicity about bats than any other place probably in the world.
There were news headlines from coast to coast saying that hundreds of thousands of rabid bats were invading and attacking the citizens of Austin.
But we fear what we don't know, and very few people know much about bats, so they're easily misunderstood and scared.
And in those days, if a bat tried to catch a mosquito near somebody, the person would run like hell thinking that they were being attacked, and they'd never even look around to see the bat catch the mosquito and go on his way.
In fact, I had one guy that claimed he was actually...
The bat actually did attack him, and when I looked at the evidence of the attack, I found these big scratches on his arm that a bat couldn't have inflicted, and turned out he'd run too close to a rosebush on his way to the house and got bit by the rosebush and blamed the bat.
In the early 1980s, there were all kinds of planted stories in the news media by pest control and health people that made money off of fear of bats.
And like Family Circle and Good Housekeeping magazines were running articles like Three Years of Terror, Real Life Ordeal.
And one of these stories had the family trapped in their home for three days and nights with bats attacking the windows and doors trying to get them.
And so people were really frightened, genuinely.
But all it took to overcome that is I ended up getting a bat of the kind that lives under the bridge, and I'd take him around and show him to people.
And I remember one lady, actually it was Ms. Crenshaw, the famous golfer's mother, She thought, you know, when she first heard I was conserving bats, she told her friends, she said, what next?
Somebody's going to be trying to conserve cockroaches.
But the first time I actually showed her a live bat in the hand, she was like, oh, isn't he cute?
You know, a whole different response.
And so bats, once people meet them, they're their own best ambassadors.
They're gentle animals that...
Almost never bite anything except an insect or fruit, except in self-defense.
And all I had to do was come to Austin and point out that this was a treasure not yet recognized.
And because of convincing Austin not to eradicate the bats today, They bring millions of tourist dollars every summer to Austin, and they eat tons of crop and yard pests every night.
A major part of my success in conserving bats has been that I look at it from a standpoint not just that Bats or other animals have rights or anything.
It's a matter of like them or not, we need them.
And if we understand them, we'll probably like them too.
And so this eradication idea that people had, that would have been a disaster, like, ecologically, if they did decide to eradicate the bats and they killed all those bats that were under the bridge?
Well, what we forget is when people warn us about the supposed dangers of having bats around, the real danger is not having bats around.
We could be practically buried in insect pests.
Bats are the primary controllers of Insects that fly at night, like mosquitoes.
A recent study in Wisconsin showed that bats living in people's bat houses, in their yards, they looked at the droppings of those bats and genetically analyzed to see what they were eating, and they found that those bats living in bat houses were eating 15 species of mosquitoes, nine of which carried West Nile virus.
Roosting crevices are three-quarters of an inch to an inch wide, usually.
The bats like those narrow crevices because they're used to snakes coming after them.
And like if a big rat snake comes into a bat house to try to catch a bat, if the bat's roosting in a place only three-quarters of an inch wide, the snake comes in, he can't open his mouth wide enough to get around the bat's head.
He can...
But the bat opens his mouth and bites the snake's nose.
So I suspect that's a large part of why bats like those narrow crevices is protection against one of their dominant predators.
Putting up bad houses can be a big help in many ways.
There's a recent study done in the Mediterranean that showed that when they put up bad houses strategically located around rice paddies, that they no longer had to use pesticides.
Those were moths that they were controlling, and bats have been found helping protect rice in Thailand where they're eating white-billed plant hoppers.
Eat a wide variety of insects.
One important point to make, you know, we hear a lot about the importance of biodiversity.
And the bat houses in the Mediterranean that successfully eliminated the need for Pesticides.
They didn't mean that there were never any more pests or that there was no pest damage.
What the bats have to do to eliminate the need for pesticides is just lower the damage to a level where the cost of the damage is less than it costs to put pesticides out.
So the reason that worked was that there was a national park not very far away, and so, you know, If you just have miles of monoculture, what do the bats do in the off-season when your pests aren't there?
They're gonna starve to death.
And so by having diverse habitat not far away, in the off-season, the bats had a place to go eat until they were kneaded over the rice paddies again.
When I got my first job, it was a really great job.
I got a full salary just to go have fun in the world as far as I looked at it because I could go anywhere in the world I wanted, stay as long as I wanted, as long as I did good research on some aspect of bat biology.
And so when I announced that I was going to resign that to do full-time bat conservation work, even my closest friends thought I was stark raving crazy.
Because in those days, almost everybody, especially in America, thought that if not all, at least most bats were rabid and they would much rather pay to have a bat killed than to have it saved.
And so...
It was very difficult at first.
You know, we hear a lot from environmentalists, conservationists, about the need to win battles.
You know, send us X amount of money so we can beat up on such and such a company.
And people, there's a certain type of people that kind of love that.
But, you know, if you're starting out to save something that everybody hates, and they'd really rather spend money to kill it than to save it, you've got to get a whole lot more clever than just asking them for money to save the animal.
So I don't think it was because I was particularly smart or anything, but I had to learn early on to win friends instead of battles.
And what I found was if I went about it right...
And I won enough friends, I didn't need to win the battles.
And that's become kind of a dominant part of my approach to conservation.
First of all, you listen to people, and I don't care if they say, you know, I had fun burning a bat cave in which I killed thousands of bats, or whatever they say.
You know, we shouldn't be dwelling in the past.
It's the future that counts.
And we've all made crazy mistakes in the past, and we wouldn't want to be hated for the rest of our lives for what we did wrong before we knew what was right.
But I found that if I listened to people...
And took them seriously and understood that even the person with the wildest tail probably had some reason for believing it.
And the more I listened and understood, the better I became at countering it.
And also, I always had the attitude of, I'm not here to just help bats.
I'm here to help people and bats.
And if you've got a problem, I want to know what it is, I want to understand it, and then maybe I can help you solve it.
And so I learned to be good at listening to people, and I'm sure you've experienced a good share of winning is just listening.
Most people will like you if you just take time to listen to them, even if you are at opposite polls of what you believe.
And so by learning to listen well and then have an attitude that what can I do to help you, I was able to change a hell of a lot of people's minds about bats.
So a lot of people, they have this idea about bats based on like horror movies, vampire movies, and whenever you see like Halloween decorations, there's always bats involved.
Bats are thought of as like a creepy kind of scary animal.
In fact, one of the big problems for bats is that, you know, out of more than 1,400 species in the world, the vast majority of them, we hardly know a thing about them other than that they've got a name.
And they fly erratically.
They live in places that people often consider kind of spooky, the basement or the attic or the cave.
And we don't know what they're going to do next because they fly so erratically and they're associated with the night.
I mean even people who work at night aren't trusted as much as people who work in the daytime.
Species often get named by where they were first discovered, and the species was first described by specimens discovered in Brazil.
Then it was discovered later that it was found all the way up into the United States, and there were subspecies named It was thought originally that there was a different subspecies in Mexico that came up into Texas and a third subspecies in Florida and the Gulf region.
And each of those subspecies, the first one was described in Brazil, so it was Taderta brasiliensis, braziliensis, and then Taderta brasiliensis mexicana from Mexico and so on.
But then a genetic study was done and found that they're so...
Broadly mixed genetically that you couldn't separate out subspecies.
And so they went back to the original name, and it's now called the Brazilian free-tailed bat, which is kind of a pain for all of us that knew it for many years as the Mexican free-tailed bat.
But that's just the way of genetics.
Sometimes I like the common names even better than the scientific because they don't seem to change as rapidly these days.
And what's really cool is even if they get damaged badly, it's amazing what their healing powers are.
Sometimes the bat can even have a broken wing and the swelling around the break will act like a cast and will hold the bone in place where the bat still is able to fly and survive until it can recover.
So these bats that we have, we have the fast-moving bats that are the Brazilian bats, and then you have the other bats which are more maneuverable, but they don't go as fast?
We'd love to radio track them when they migrate south and see where they're going, but it can be a real problem trying to track a bat at night across the U.S.-Mexican border without getting shot down by somebody.
I was down looking for bats in the daytime one time with a friend who was an ex-aircraft Navy pilot, and we were in his private plane looking for bats down low along the New Mexico-Texas border.
First thing we knew, we got forced to land by drug agents that had overtaken us.
And when we landed, we were surrounded by guys with guns, thinking they had really made the catch of the year, somebody dumb enough to fly in the daytime with his drugs.
And they were very disappointed to find out we were just bat people.
You know, I've never gone there and personally seen it, but I'm told that there's a place...
On the island of Bali, where there's a guy that has tamed wild flying foxes that have these nearly six-foot wingspans, and visitors can actually come, and he'll call them down out of the trees, and they can hang on their arms sometimes for a photo.
Well, one of the secrets of my—I don't know if you've seen my— I have a large photo collection.
I have the largest collection of bat photos in the world.
And a lot of my photos, I get these incredible pictures because I can actually train bats to come and do their natural thing where I can photograph them.
Bats like that account for up to 98% of the first seed dispersal into cleared areas in Africa.
And as you may be aware, desertification is one of the biggest threats in Africa.
People cut down the forest, they abandon the land after a few years when it's not any longer productive, and then you very much need something to reseed it.
And these fruit-eating bats Are often badly over-harvested for human food, and most recently because they've been wrongly blamed as a source of Ebola.
And when that happens, people don't tolerate them anymore, and there goes the seed dispersal that people need if they're going to continue to have viable land.
Well, what I'm saying is there is evidence that American Indians occasionally ate bats because there have been jugs, pottery jugs, with lots of bat bones in them that looked like they were eaten probably by Indians.
But in the old world, where bats are much larger, they are frequently eaten, and that's a major cause of their decline.
I don't see a reason to play favorites among animals.
You know, some people think it's okay to rear cattle and Poultry and things in horrible circumstances to eat, but it's totally bad if a hunter goes out and shoots something from the wild to eat.
Actually, I know this isn't going to sit well with everybody, but I would rather in many cases see us harvesting wild animals It would be more compatible with a healthy environment than cutting down all the trees in a rainforest so that we can run cattle.
But there is something to be said for the hunting side.
Hunters get abused a lot by conservationists that become too emotionally involved with their animals.
People often ask me...
You must really love bats.
No, I don't really love bats.
I'm a scientist who's very fascinated by them, and I'm impressed with how valuable they are, how much we need them.
But when I go out to do conservation, I'm looking out for both bats and people.
And I think that's the only way we can really be successful.
When we get too emotional about animals and we think they have rights that we need to Look out for over human needs, then we start getting into trouble.
For example, years ago, led the way in getting a national park created in American Samoa.
And how it all started was there were commercial hunters that were devastating flying foxes.
They were shooting them and selling them to Guam for a delicacy.
And in a very short time, they had wiped out most of the flying foxes from the whole area.
And I was asked by a then-Harvard botanist graduate student who was finishing up his PhD if I would come and do something to help save the bats.
So I got together a couple donors and him, and we went out to American Samoa.
And the first thing I did the first day, my collaborators were all worn out from an overnight flight, so they slept in.
And while they were sleeping in, I went out and made friends with the commercial hunters.
And I just came across as another guy that was perfectly happy with hunting.
And in fact, I'm sure as a population ecologist that we need hunters.
We've wiped out most of the dominant predators of the world, and if somebody doesn't act as the dominant predators, we're going to have trouble.
But I went out and I made friends with the hunters, and they actually invited me to go out on a hunt with them that night.
Well, I didn't shoot any of the bats, but they only shot two in the whole evening, and they were saying, oh, you should have been here last year.
We could have shot 100 in an hour.
And I just asked innocent questions, you know, not too many of them at once.
What do you think caused all this?
And they readily admitted that they shot too many.
And so, you know, eventually I'd ask, well, what are you going to do?
You know, your grandchildren are not going to be able to hunt bats anymore because you hunt them all out?
And after just a few nights, now, when my colleagues found out what I'd been doing, oh, my God, if I'd been fireable, I would have been fired.
They were very upset that I had consorted with the enemy.
But in the end, these commercial hunters recognized they had a problem, and they actually – when I told them that in a few days I was going to be meeting with Governor Lutale, they were thrilled when I offered to intercede with the governor on behalf of getting game laws to make sure they were flying foxes in the future.
We joined forces that way, and as they learned more about the flying foxes and what they did, they not only got game laws passed in record time, but they self-imposed on themselves.
Actually, they completely outlawed commercial hunting.
The commercial hunters did.
And then they themselves declared a five-year moratorium on all flying fox hunting so that they could recover.
And when I asked about it of a Samoan biologist 25 years later, he said they still weren't hunting flying foxes, and the flying foxes had recovered.
I think there is some hunting now, but The point is, if we had just gone barreling in there that we hated these guys because they did something that we didn't like and they had almost caused the extinction of a bat, we would have gotten nowhere.
And if we had insisted that they quit all hunting immediately, we would have gotten nowhere.
But by being willing to compromise and see both sides early on, we gained a whole national park in addition to solving our original problem and showed the value of making friends instead of winning battles.
The reason I'm hesitant is that one time I was coming out of a news conference at National Geographic.
They'd just published...
I've done five articles with them, and they'd just done a news conference about my article on flying foxes.
As I was coming out of their front door, an Associated Press reporter approached me and said, Well, you said that there's a real problem with people eating too many flying foxes.
Have you ever had one?
And being honest, I said, Well, you know, in Thailand one morning, I'd been out with poachers learning about what they were doing to cause problems.
And, you know, they were doing something that I really didn't.
I wanted to stop, but they were really nice people.
The guys, the poachers, were just trying to support their families, and we got to be friends.
And they invited me for breakfast, and what did they serve me?
Bat's burger.
And they chopped up the bat's They did this with chickens and fish, too.
They would chop them up, bones and all.
And my God, I used to kid some of them about how they survived without dying of punctured throats or stomachs from all those bones.
Well, they chopped up these patties.
And in Thailand, especially in those days, if you refused to eat what somebody served you, it was the ultimate insult.
You were implying that they were trying to poison you, and you didn't trust them.
So I... Ended up trying to eat part of one of those burgers.
Yeah, I've got Parkinson's and I have to take pills several times a day, but...
I mentioned that I do have Parkinson's because I'd like to encourage others that have it that, you know, oftentimes if you've got something you're living for and you're working out and staying in health, you can still function perfectly fine taking a few pills and going on with your life.
Actually, I'm told that in the South Pacific, it's considered bad etiquette if you don't eat the skin, too.
But to finish these guys' story, I... I surreptitiously spit most of it out because I just wasn't about to swallow all those chopped up bones, but I admitted that I had had a couple mouthfuls of bat.
This reporter went out and did a major story in which he claimed that Dr. Merlin Tuttle, this famous bat conservationist, traveled the world looking for new ways to eat bats.
And I've never been so beside myself angry.
I went to a judge friend and asked if there was anything I could do, and he said, no, no, you're too well known as a public figure.
I mean, my Thai assistant, Sirupon Dwanke, he was a great guy, but he never had any problem, and Although I must say he didn't eat bats while he was with me, but I do have a funny story to tell on him.
One of the caves that we ended up saving, we were going up to it early one morning before sun-up, and we were having to go through jumbled boulders and brush, and I'm aware that Snakes often congregate at cave entrances to try to catch and eat bats, especially in that area, cobras.
So I'm saying, Serapone, are we okay?
You know, how about cobras here?
And...
He says, oh, no worry.
You know, when I was in the military, they taught us, cobra is gentle, no attack, no problem.
And then a few days later, I saw a man, we saw a man running real hard down the road.
And Serpon says, man, run like chased by cobra.
And I said, well, I thought you said cobras don't attack people.
He said, oh, only when they're guarding their eggs.
Well, snakes usually, they'll like to hang from a vine or a bush or something where they can hang their head down into the flight plan of the bats and they'll wait until a wing touches their nose and then they can be incredibly fast about grabbing the bat.
Yeah, and that's a thing that's brought up oftentimes about hunters is the conservation aspect of it, is that in wanting to preserve these animals so that they can hunt them, they actually contribute more money I know of cases like that.
For example, in Mexico they have desert bighorn sheep.
I'm told that a good trophy sized bighorn ram, you might pay $100,000 to shoot one.
And I'm told that there's at least one and maybe several ranches now in Mexico where the owner has found that it's more profitable to reduce his cattle and promote bighorn sheep.
And, you know, if he can make $100,000 for one sheep being shot...
He has to run a lot of cattle and go to a lot of work to make that kind of money off his cattle.
And so, actually I like these situations where there's economic incentive for preserving a wild animal.
I'm told that where that is happening, that natural vegetation is recurring, biodiversity is expanding.
Cattle aren't adapted to live in those places.
They do a lot of destruction.
But as long as the ultimate goal is that we're improving the health of The natural world and all creatures are benefiting.
And when it's ready to be seed dispersed, it opens just a crack enough to let the scent out, and there's this big bat that knows exactly how to pry this loose.
The reason for all this armor plating is that the plant does not want monkeys or other primates or parrots or other birds.
It just wants bats because bats are the best seed dispersers and so it's going to all this energetic trouble to protect itself from everything but bats.
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The bat pries this off So that just kind of falls open?
He carries this away and drops the seed when he finishes eating.
And, in fact, this...
Nut that's in this fruit would be commercially sold if we could figure out how to beat the bats to it, but it's grown way up high on trees and we don't have a system for beating the bats to it.
I mean, I don't know much about bat vision, but I always thought bats had very poor vision, and they used sound, and they used, like, a radar to find where they're going.
The flower so wants to be pollinated, and I don't want to be anthropomorphic, but it's very advantageous to be visited by—oh, here's the other one.
See how the bat fills up the gap and carries pollen?
Yeah.
In the Makuna flowers, the— The flower doesn't even open and become reproductively active until about 45 minutes after dark so that it's totally avoiding any late coming hummingbirds or bees or anything like that.
It's on a long stem that hangs down so that possums or anything like that can't get to it.
And it opens late and then it has just a little slit that's a millimeter or two wide.
And the tongue of the bat has to go into that just like a lock, a key in a door, in a lock.
The reason it took me 11,000 pictures to get this is that this all happens in tiny fractions of a second.
And what's going to happen next is his tongue goes in there...
The flower actually has spring-loaded anthers and fires the pollen onto his rump.
That's why you see pollen flying around as he's just been shot.
And by putting it on the bat's rump, then that flower doesn't mix pollen with other species, which might cause hybridization that would result in inferior plant production.
So at that location, I found some flowers, they're all blooming at the same time, but one species was the bat, it put pollen on the bat's rump, another one put it on his throat, another one put it on his snout, another one put it on the back of his head, and one put it between his shoulders, and another one put it on his wings.
Now, this one has a really cool tongue that acts like a soda straw, and he can stick it down in there, and by, I think you'd call it peristaltic action, he's got a groove down each side of the tongue.
And those grooves then form cavities like straws, and he can bring the nectar up just like he had a long straw in the flower.
I can kind of understand the bats adapting, but the plants, it's like the plants are almost thinking, there's so-and-so over there that's doing this, so I got to do that.
And not just a partnership with the bats, but an understanding that other plants are going to pollinate on different parts of the bat.
And you don't want to mix your pollen with that pollen, so we're going to pollinate on an area when the bat is feeding, we know we can get to his head.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to claim bats think, but, you know, the more we discover about the natural world, the more we find that there's just a whole lot of thinking and behavior that we never even suspected.
For example, the bats.
It's been found in recent years that they have social systems strikingly similar to those of primates, whales, and elephants.
In my own banding studies years ago, I banded 40-some thousand bats in one study.
And I showed that over periods of a decade, sometimes you'd find the same bats, like you caught four or five bats together in a place at one time.
Ten years before.
And then you might catch them five years later, two miles away.
Ten years later, twenty miles away.
All still together.
Wow.
And bats not only know each other and have what we, you know, we used to criticize people soundly for what we call anthropomorphizing, but that's almost getting to be a An out-of-date word as we find more about what animals really do and think.
Bats help each other in need.
They'll adopt orphans.
They form apparently long-term friendships.
There are all kinds of cool things that are going on in the world of bats.
One thing I would like to point out to your listeners, all these things that we're talking about and these pictures you're seeing, I have thousands of those pictures available on my website at merlintuttle.org, and you can go there and see all these things that you're seeing glimpses of now.
After I learned to train frog-eating bats for my research, I thought, well, these carnivores are just, they're smarter than other bats.
It never dawned on me that other bats might be trainable, too.
Especially really small bats.
And then one time I went out to West Texas and I caught a fairly large pallet bat and I wanted to take a picture for National Geographic of it catching centipedes six, eight inches long.
They're immune to the stings and they eat centipedes and scorpions.
And so I was training this bat to come to my hand on call because I was going to Put in a natural-looking set, a centipede, and call it to come down and catch the centipede to get the picture.
And after the bat finally got too full to want to come again, I had this little western pipistrelle that weighs less than a nickel, tiny little bat, body about that big.
Do you think it's watching and observing, or do you think there's some other information that might be being distributed, whether it's through sound or whether it's through some sort of...
Maybe some sort of like some unknown connection that they have to each other, pheromonal connection, psychic connection?
Let me tell you a story that really still boggles my mind.
My wife and I had gone to Barneo and set up my portable photo studio.
We were going to photograph little woolly bats that weigh less than a nickel.
Again, tiny, tiny little guys.
And they live out in swamps, where there's no way we could go out in the swamp to photograph, and they live in pitcher plants.
And get this, the pitcher plant puts up a reflector over the top to guide the bat to get to the pitcher plant, and then has a special ridge inside where he can sleep, almost like providing a bunk bed.
And we had gone out there to photograph these bats, but we couldn't do it out in the swamp because it rained every little bit and you're wading waist deep and there are poisonous snakes hanging from the vines and it just wasn't a good place to take pictures.
So we caught this bat, brought it back to my studio, and the first evening I hand-fed it mealworms.
Holding it one hand and handing it mealworms with the other.
And then the next morning when my wife and I came back to the studio, this bat was hanging up in one corner of the studio, and it immediately recognized me.
It didn't try to go to her.
She didn't feed it before.
He came to me and started bumping me in the nose.
In fact, I believe you may have a video of that that you can share.
He started bumping me in the nose.
And I don't know how I so quickly figured it out, but I figured out that he wanted to be fed.
He wasn't really attacking me.
And so my wife saw this and said, Get your shirt on.
It was really hot, and I didn't have a shirt on.
And get your shirt on, and she grabbed the camera.
Watch this bat.
He's coming up pestering me to give him a mealworm.
He's only one time in his whole life eaten a mealworm, only one time gotten it from me, and how did he figure out that my face was the place to get my attention?
So I went and got my shirt on, and it was still doing this.
Watch, when I held up my hand, it knew to come and get the mealworm.
And this bat had never had a mealworm in his life before, may never have eaten a non-flying insect before, certainly never seen a human until the night before.
You know how like they've done experiments with crows where they find out how intelligent crows are because they can get them to use tools and there's a little cough button if you want to use that.
It would have to be something in line with what they...
I can't comment.
What I can tell you is that one of the smartest colleagues that I ever had, a guy named Jack Bradbury, he was a top-notch bat researcher.
He ended up going off studying, I think it was grouse or something, but back when he was studying bats many years ago, he announced that he was going to try to test Vampyram Spectrum.
This is a big carnivorous bat with a Nearly three-foot wingspan.
It's the biggest New World bat.
Lives in the tropical America.
He was going to test them to see how smart they were.
And this is a cool bat.
Before I tell you about his test, the parents take turns babysitting.
They go out and they hunt and bring food back for the one that stayed and watched the pup.
If you went to my website, one of the cutest pictures on my website, one that I get a big kick out of showing people, because when I show it to them, their reaction is, oh my god, isn't he cute?
Well, if you get rabies, you're going to die, but most of the time you will.
But take me, for example.
I've been studying bats for over 60 years worldwide.
I've studied bats in 45 countries, photographed hundreds of species, handled them, spent countless hours with millions in caves, and I have never, ever been attacked by a bat.
I have only been bitten when I was handling one, and he bit in self-defense.
It would be a good guess, but I'm sure that I have seen a rabid bat.
They're not a whole lot with rabies.
When you sample wild populations, actually, one of the things that bats get a bad name for is it's much easier to catch a sick bat than a healthy bat.
So when they go out and catch bats, and they say, well, up to a half of 1% are rabid, What that's like is if you go to the waiting room of a cancer specialist doctor and you examine the people there, you're going to get a bit higher frequency of cancer than you would from the base population.
We don't really know how many have rabies, but what we can tell you is it's very few.
And you can forget disease from bats just about entirely if you just don't go around picking up...
You know, if you find a bat where you can handle it in the daytime, it's probably a sick bat.
Let me point out that while we make a big deal out of the one or two people in a year that die of rabies from a bat bite in the US and Canada combined, in the US alone, we lose between 40 and 50 people a year from dog attacks.
But before we go on a rampage to rid dogs from our neighborhoods, we might consider how hypocritical that would be in a country where our spouses kill us off by the thousands.
So the moral of the story is if you're brave enough to own a dog and get married, you certainly ought to be brave enough to handle having a few bats in your neighborhood.
Well, I've slept plenty of night in a hammock in the rainforest, but never without a mosquito net over me.
There are a whole lot of things that can bite you besides vampire bats, and it's just foolish to be sleeping out in the open in a South American rainforest.
And so that's just something that just got spread and turned into this lore, and they don't even exist in the place where they were supposedly, like, turned into vampires.
First of all, they're among the least known, most feared, most often needlessly persecuted animals.
Secondly, they have very slow reproductive rates.
They are programmed to live up to 40 years or more.
And that brings up another interesting aspect.
Instead of trying to find ways to fear bats, we ought to be finding ways to understand better why they can do the really neat things that they can do.
They can survive up to 40 years In the wild, and that's the equivalent of a human living to be 100 and still able to run sprints through obstacle courses.
They're also largely immune to things like arthritis and cancer.
But they're very vulnerable because they're dependent on long lifespans and slow reproduction.
Most bats produce only one pup per year.
They aggregate in these huge concentrations.
You can get millions in a single cave.
And here in the New World...
I have personally investigated cases where somebody just put old car tires in a cave entrance, poured kerosene on it, lit it on fire, and killed millions in single incidents.
Because bats form the largest, most conspicuous colonies, are the most easily seen and also misunderstood, and have slow reproduction, they're prime targets for bad things to happen in terms of survival.
So in my travels studying bats, I have had every kind of experience you can imagine from living with aboriginal Indians to being captured by terrorist insurgents to— You got captured?
Yeah, having my camp attacked by bandits, being hunted by Aborigines that had bad experience with other outsiders and wanted to kill me, being charged by angry elephants, stalked by lions, you name it and I've had it.
Well, that's a really good story to illustrate the value of being able to make friends, whether you agree with somebody or not.
Back in my first big job out of college, I was co-director of the Smithsonian's Venezuelan project, a big $400,000 field project collecting small mammals.
And one of the first places we stayed It was high up on a mountaintop in a resort setting where the previous dictator of the country had built this, and when he was thrown out of power, nobody wanted to acknowledge that that was worth anything, so it was just sitting up there with a caretaker.
Well, we were allowed to go up there and use it for collecting.
It was a beautiful habitat surrounding it.
I quickly found out, figured out, that the head caretaker there was actually one of the local communist leaders.
And we got to be good friends.
And he would laughingly call me his amigo, Yonke, and I'd call him mi amigo, Commie.
And, you know, it wasn't very hard to find common ground that neither one of us agreed with everything our governments did.
And I got to be such good friends with him that when my boss, Dr. Hanley, came down, he was the director of the Mammal Division at the Smithsonian, when he came down to visit and see how things were going, I borrowed the local communist Leader borrowed his Jeep,
because ours hadn't arrived yet, and I took Dr. Hanley with me looking for bats up in the mountains, and we had the misfortune of running into a secret meeting of communist insurgents.
There ensued a wild chase.
We were on a muddy, slick road, very narrow one lane, sometimes dropping off 200 feet on one side.
It was crazy.
They finally caught us, and when they caught us, the only thing that saved us was we were in the Communist Party boss's jeep, and they radioed him for instructions what to do with us.
One night on the upper Mavaca River, We were named bats in an area where we didn't think there were any Aborigines that would bother us, because we had camped with a group of Yanomamo, and the idea was you couldn't put a camp between village of Yanomamo because then they would all think they could prey on you.
But if you became friends of one village, at least they wouldn't bother you, and they would view you as useful.
So the village that we were staying with, the guys informed me that now way up the river, 30 miles or so, there was an area that I would love to have collected in.
But I couldn't because it was controlled by a group of Yanomamo that had shot at everybody who had ever gotten near there and shot arrows.
And so I was afraid to go up there to do any collecting.
But then our group of Yanomamo informed me that these guys had gone off on a raid to attack another group and probably wouldn't be back for a couple of months.
So I got brave and went up into their area where I didn't think they were going to be with a young man, Venezuelan, who worked for me.
And we had just parked our dugout canoe on the bank and had gone out into the woods to set nets for bats.
When we hear a hundred or so, maybe not a hundred, but a goodly number of Yonamamo men coming down the trail, and we immediately thought, oh my god, we're going to be absolutely dead ducks if they find us.
But I did know that they don't usually go after their quarry, they usually wait and ambush.
So we hid out in the jungle until about 2 o'clock in the morning and then tried turning our lights really dim and sneaking along without making any noise to get back to our canoe and hoping they were asleep.
And we'll never know whether they were asleep or not because We did get shoved off and got away.
But the very next night, we were stupid enough to think we had gone far enough away that they wouldn't find us, and we went back and tried to net again, and then we heard jaguar noises.
And I had a Yanomamo and a Maiketitari Indian working for me, and they immediately started warning me, that's not El Tigre, that's the Indians that we're trying to avoid.
I thought that these guys were just trying to get out of work because I'd been working them pretty hard and that they wanted to go to bed early that night.
So I didn't really take them very seriously.
And I went off with my shotgun.
Back then, we were collecting everything from jaguars to mice.
And in those days, it was a big macho thing to shoot a jaguar.
So I go off with my shotgun to hunt the jaguar.
And it kept moving too fast without noise in between, and it finally dawned on me that, hey, this is more like Indians than Jaguars to me, even.
I went back and my guys were just ready to actually abandon me and leave me.
They were so scared.
We didn't even take the nets down.
We got out of there as fast as we could, went back to camp, and the next day when we came back to get our nets, all the main strands of the nets had been stolen, proving that these were Indians that were after us.
I mean, there was the time I was crawling into a cave on my belly in a narrow passage and all of a sudden found that there was a big cobra coming out and I had to lay perfectly still so that the cobra didn't get upset while he was going by.
To put a long story shorter, the Cossicari Canal is the world's longest natural canal.
Out in the middle of it, there are just no humans around.
And we were camped out there collecting for the Smithsonian.
But I carried a lot of small cash to do business when I did come to where there were villages.
The small cash was hidden in false bottoms of trunks.
The way I got the cash, we were funded through a military grant, and anybody that knows anything about the military knows they've got every restriction under the sun on their money and accounting for it.
I had known that their rules weren't going to work very well for collecting, and so I had gotten bids from plane charter companies to fly us out to this remote Savannah.
And they were going to charge a lot of money because it was risky to the planes.
And so I got the military to send the money to the Bank of America in Caracas, and then this was a time when you had machine guns at the door of every bank.
And, I mean, it was a dangerous time in the Venezuela period.
Well, we pretended to change Christmas gifts, And that's how we got our money into small change and took it back to our hotel.
Then we put it in false bottoms of trunks.
Then we go out to the frontier.
And after a while, the word kind of gets around that these guys can always pay for something.
They must have some secret supply of money.
So one day we're out at this remote camp, and my Venezuelan helpers, Indians, came running up saying, oh, you know, in Spanish, quedado, the vandal, not vandals, but the robbers are coming.
And...
They were coming up the river in a little motorized dugout, and so that's how my guys heard them in time to know that they were coming, and then they saw them and realized who they were.
And so I had just a couple minutes.
It's kind of interesting because I was reared to be a conscientious objector.
And, you know, didn't believe in fighting and war.
And so here we are with the bandits coming armed with – it was kind of interesting.
They had old muzzleloader guns that they actually used rocks in – rocks and black powder still to shoot.
But here they're coming, and I'm responsible for – Eight or ten people their lives, and am I going to be a conscientious objector, or what am I going to do?
And so I broke out all the guns we had, gave everybody everything from an M1 rifle to a couple double-barreled shotguns, pistols, and got everybody positioned behind rocks and logs.
And then as the bandits approached, I yelled down to them in Spanish that we understood who they were, and if they touched that rock, we were going to kill them.
And they kept coming.
And so I finally had everybody show themselves and their guns.
And yelled one more time, and the last time I yelled, they were within a meter of hitting the bank.
And at that point, we'd have had to kill them.
But they finally, at the last minute when they saw they were outgunned, and we had the upper hand, they backed up and went off.
I did not know when we started on the trip that the reason – see, these two shamatari came out to visit our Yanomamo group because they were looking for allies in a battle.
They were expecting to be raided by another tribe.
And I didn't know this was why they were there.
But when I asked through my interpreters, And let me point this out, too.
When you watch a movie and they're speaking Pigeon English, you know, there's no such thing as a place where people are really Aboriginal and you're speaking Pigeon English to them.
Everything I said on that whole trip out there had to be translated by me from English to Spanish, and then from Spanish to Maikatari, from Maikatari to Yanamama, and from Yanamama to Shamitari.
And what we eventually found was that the reason they welcomed us so strongly was that they thought we'd bring our bang sticks with us, needing guns, and be good in the battle.
Well, we had to camp out along the trail the first night, and we found out that they were expecting an attack.
My two guys, I had to have a Yanomamu and a Maiketitari for the translations to go.
And incidentally, they knew enough that they wouldn't go.
I had a terrible time getting them to go.
When I finally convinced them, I had to pay them a month's wages for every day they went out there with me.
So that first night, we set up camp by a beautiful stream in the jungle.
And then my guys got really suspicious when our two Shamitari hosts went off by themselves quite a ways away in a hidden place in the jungle to put up little shelters for their night.
And so they got suspicious, went and checked, and found that they were worried about being attacked.
And they were leaving us out on the trail to be the bait.
But the next day, we arrived out there.
And my Maiketitari guide had experienced, he had been in a Yanomamo village during an attack once.
And so he, since we knew they were thinking of being attacked any time, he instructed me what to do if we were attacked.
And he said, you know, right off, you know, play dead.
And we were thinking that the attack might come at night.
And sure enough, the very first night we're there, I mean, talk about scary experiences.
Long before we thought we were being attacked, there were people that had malaria, and there were guys getting really high on drugs to chase the hikura, the devils, out.
And they were going around the— Chase the devils out?
They hadn't evolved to think of one god and one devil.
There were just a lot of spirits with good ones and bad ones.
And they were trying to chase the bad ones out of the village by getting high on dope and then shooting those curare-tipped arrows at the hallucinated images.
If you go to my website, there's a place on the website where you can – I'm trying to remember.
We can tell you later exactly how to get to it.
But I've got a place on my website where you can actually see that trip, me out there with – I had a movie camera with me.
You can see them blowing the dope up their nose, and I've got it on film right up until the guy tried to attack and kill me, and then I had to quit taking pictures.
I've gone to bed, and these guys are getting high, and they're running around the village shooting those seven-foot curare-tipped arrows into hallucinated images.
And I'm hearing those things go thunk into the side of the, you know, we're sleeping under lean-tos, is how the village has made a big circle of lean-tos.
That I had just founded Bat Conservation International.
I did found Bat Conservation International, and I'm proud of what we have managed to accomplish there in the nearly 30 years that I led the organization, but I'm no longer there, as often happens with founders of nonprofits or even corporations.
Over time, the directors sometimes diverge in their priorities from what the founder wants to have, and You get pushed out.
Eventually, it just got to be untenable where we weren't accomplishing what we needed to accomplish because we were disagreeing over what we should be doing.
The thing is, despite, you know, I can tell you stories endlessly of the great things we've accomplished, we didn't just protect the bats at the Congress Avenue Bridge.
I've gotten millions of bats protected in many other places, got a national park in Samoa.
But right now, bats are in big, big trouble.
Despite all that progress we've made protecting individual groups of bats and species of bats, bats are among the most rapidly declining animals, most endangered animals on the planet.
I've already pointed out how susceptible they are because of their slow reproduction and congregating in large numbers where they're easy to pick on.
Right now, one of my biggest concerns is to Well, we've already formed Merlin Tuttle's bat conservation, but what I need to do next is to ensure that my legacy of information, photographs, and other things remains available to help others long after I'm dead.
I know I'm not going to live forever.
I'm 81. I've got Parkinson's, but I'm still going great.
And I'm hoping to go great until I'm 90. I love what I do.
And I love helping both people and bats, and that's what makes me successful.
I'm not just animals have rights, step aside.
I'm trying to solve problems for people, help people live in a better world with healthier...
Surroundings, and in doing that I'm helping bats.
But the next big challenge is we need to raise an endowment for my organization, and that would seem to be a bit much for an organization that's saving traditionally unpopular animals.
But I was thinking over breakfast this morning, all would have to happen is People listening right now give even a couple dollars a piece, and we'd have the endowment that it would take to make a huge difference for bats, for people, and make an old man damned happy.
The guys would get high as a part of – when they got high, they would see these, quotes, Hakura, the spirits that they thought they saw in their hallucinations, and then they'd go try to chase them out of the village.
And if anything happened to me out there, it would just be, remember years ago when the Rockefeller person just disappeared and nobody knew what happened to him?