Weird Science Goggle-Headed Freaks Keep Tabs On Night-Stalking Nectar-Sippers. By Kevin Franklin PICTURE A LAWN chair deep in the desert somewhere near Sierra Vista. The time is 2:30 a.m. If your eyes could penetrate the pitch black darkness, you would see me amid ocotillo and desert grass, a strange apparatus like a cross between a skullcap and a pair of binoculars strapped to my head. Staring at a blooming agave stalk, I sip a Coke and occasionally talk into a tape recorder. Bat-patrol is my idea of a Saturday night. While they may have first-rate sonar, I have my own nocturnal advantage with a pair of night-vision goggles. They belong to bat-researcher Yar Petryszyn and are third-generation quality, meaning they're the same caliber as the ones used in Desert Storm. The boulders on a hillside a half-mile away are as crisp to me now as they would be in daylight--although they're varying shades of green. With this high-tech gadgetry, I feel like I'm in a Tom Clancy novel. But no crazed KGB agents threaten us tonight. I'm here with Petryszyn and several other biologists and assistants to try to protect the Leptonycteris sanborni, a.k.a the lesser long-nosed bat. The bats migrate to the United States annually. The females arrive in the Arizona desert in May to feed on the blossoms of saguaro and organ pipe cactus and rear their young. In late July to mid-August they move to the oak-juniper woodlands. Here they meet up with the adult males and a feeding frenzy of agave nectar ensues. From 7:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. we watch blooming agaves in order to see how many times a bat flies up to a bloom and pokes its head around. During our evening we register more than 3,000 hits to a single agave. Petryszyn and others are concerned about the continuing growth of Sierra Vista. As new suburbs crop up in agave habitat, biologists want to know how important the local plant life is to the bats. From our numbers and similar numbers around our study area, the answer seems to be: "vital." Without a viable population of agaves at different altitudes blooming at different times during the summer, the bats would have nothing to eat. One mitigating thing homeowners and developers can do is plant native agaves. Unlike large, flightless mammals, bats can move among human habitations with ease, as happy to visit agaves blooming in a backyard as on a mountainside. They'll also come to hummingbird feeders. The bats are fun to watch, play an important role in pollinating our desert cactus and, hell, they're even cute. But irrational bat phobias live on. In 1991, two yahoos from Mesa with a .22 hand gun chose bats living under a bridge northeast of Phoenix for target practice. The bats had moved into an expansion joint and, as they were all lined up in neat row, each shot killed several bats. The noise of the gunfire and ricochet deafened dozens of others, leaving the sonar-dependent bats to sicken and die from starvation and disorientation. A total of 1,000 bats died there. Even supposedly educated people hate bats. In 1991 the University of Arizona tried to exterminate its population of bug-eating Mexican free-tailed bats living in the stadium. During the seven months the 1,000 bats live there, they devour 7,000 pounds of bugs. Unfortunately, some bats living in the center expansion joint were crapping on the new stadium restaurant, much to the delight of the staff. Typical of the administration's scorn for its own faculty, nobody bothered to ask Petryszyn (one of the Southwest's premiere bat experts, who's located a block away from the stadium) or the three other bat experts on campus what to do. Instead they tried to freeze the bats with fire extinguishers and coat them with glue. About 100 bats died in the effort. When the controversy erupted, Petryszyn and others came up with the simple solution of sealing up the middle expansion joint and leaving the two end ones for the bats. This would keep the bats alive and in place and the restaurant below the crack guano-free. But even with this viable alternative, Stephen Kozachik, Athletic Department program coordinator, called it a piecemeal solution and moved for the violent removal of all the bats. Only when the administration sensed a growing public relations disaster did they reign in Kozachik and company and go with Petryszyn's plan. As the suburbs and athletic departments continue to grow, let's hope our understanding and accommodation of the natural world grows with them.

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