(insects chirping) (bats screeching) - [Niki] Half of the world exists at night.

(calming music) It's really peaceful, like it can be scary but it's right for me it's right on the other side of scary where it's like a little uncomfortable but in an exciting way.

Even if all you're exploring is like your backyard.

(calming music) - Well hey Niki let's go in here because I wanna show you some really nice looking bats that you'll recognize right away.

- [Niki] Oh okay who do you have in here?

- [Barb] Well I have the silver hair Cleobatra.

- [Niki] Yay.

- [Barb] And then Peggy and Sue.

- So I would consider myself an informal educator in bat conservation.

I love to go out and teach other people about bats on any scale that they wanna talk about bats.

How long would you expect her to live?

- [Barb] Probably outlive me.

(laughing) - [Niki] When we think about bats we think about one thing and it comes from movies, it comes from Halloween, it comes from that like black bat in the sky that lives in a cave where bats are these things that are like you know related to vampires and are associated with you know scary places and graveyards or are gonna fly into your hair or you know suck your blood.

If we don't replace that with like actual education about bats, about real bats, about their real story, then those things just kind of perpetuate and they lead to these fears that people don't need to have.

(gentle music) If we lose them we're really gonna lose out on some really important things.

(gentle music) So Washington's interesting.

We have fourteen or fifteen species.

And so the little brown bats are one of our most common urban species here in Washington.

That's been one of the species hardest hit by white-nose syndrome which is a fungus that was found in the Eastern United States in 2006.

It can take out up to a hundred percent of a colony over a winter.

So federally the little brown bat is under consideration for the Endangered Species Act.

We found that people who do care, who have empathy for a species, are much more likely to act to benefit that species.

And so we were kind of thinking about like how we could facilitate that.

(calming music) (footsteps crunching) - [Niki] Good.

(calming music) (crowd conversing) - Right now I am going to make tostadas de chapulines which means grasshoppers.

People all over the world eat insects.

And today we're gonna give people a chance to do the same inspired by the bats we hope to see tonight.

I never saw myself as a bat chef but I have been intrigued by bats my whole life and I'm really excited to have this food bonding experience.

- I have one in my mouth.

- Yeah me too.

- [Child] Hey mom should I try it?

- I think I felt a leg.

(laughing) - [Niki] Welcome to Bat Night.

- [Crowd] Woo hoo!

- So I'm gonna do a really kind of quick Bats 101.

We're gonna talk about what bats are all about, what our local bats are about.

Bats live between twenty and forty years which is the longest of any animal on earth for their size.

There are over 1,450 different species of bats in the world.

They're incredibly diverse and there are bats on every continent except Antarctica.

They live in every habitat and every ecosystem except our coldest, highest elevation arid places.

And they're just as diverse as our species of birds are.

So our smallest bat in the world is called a kitti's hog-nosed bat.

It is also affectionately called the bumblebee bat.

Because it is literally, its body is the size of my thumb.

- So here in the United States we have our bug eating bats who protect us from mosquitoes and bloodborne pathogens, who protect our crops and our gardens, and our food sources from beetles and moss that would destroy them so we're a big fan of that.

(gentle music) (crowd chattering) - Can we jump ahead of you first?

We're gonna go that way.

(gentle music) - All the better to see bats with.

- Yup.

So let's start our observation.

(crickets chirping) - There he is.

- There did you see him?

- Yeah.

- Oh yeah.

- That's a good size bat.

I bet that's a big brown bat.

- Just flew right over us.

- Flew over our heads.

- Yes - There he is.

- Ahhh - That's a great one.

It is fun to kind of like see people's reactions and I hope it's because they understand them better.

Now they'll go out and they'll recognize bats when they see them flying around next summer and they'll tell the person they're out with and that person can have an experience seeing a bat for for maybe the first time or recognizing that they're here and just get them to be a little bit more of a familiar sighting.

Something that isn't so scary or so distant but an actual part of our neighborhoods.

(calm music)