Photogenic Oregon bats win a third consecutive time at annual bat beauty contest

The weeklong Bureau of Land Management’s annual Bat Beauty Contest closes, appropriately enough, on Halloween this year. Voting has taken place on the BLM’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. The competition features photos of bats taken primarily by government biologists who survey and work with bats on public lands in 12 western states, including Oregon. There are 15 species of bats native to Oregon, including eight whose numbers are declining or at-risk, according to the state’s wildlife agency.

Bats from Oregon have now won the contest three years in a row. Top honors went this year to a bat named Hoary Potter and the Guano of Fire, which was photographed by Emma Busk, a wildlife technician in the Ashland field office in the Medford district of the Bureau of Land Management. She won the contest last year as well. Busk joins us to talk about Oregon bats and the vital roles they play in our ecosystems.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The election is over. The results are in. All right, not that election, but the Bureau of Land Management holds a Bat Beauty Contest every year. It gives the public a chance to vote on photos of bats taken primarily by government biologists who survey and work with bats on public lands in 12 western states, including Oregon. The voting happens on the BLM’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. It ended today on Halloween.

Bats from Oregon have won the contest for two years in a row. Last year’s winner was a Townsend’s big-eared bat, photographed by Emma Busk. She’s a BLM wildlife technician who works out of the Ashland field office. We have just learned – and this is truly breaking news – that Busk has made it a three-peat for Oregon. Her photo of a bat named Hoary Potter and the Guano of Fire has won. Emma Busk joins us now. Congratulations on this achievement.

Emma Busk: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, we’re excited. It’s truly breaking news.

Miller: All right, let’s take a step back. Why have a beauty contest for bats?

Busk: It’s kind of a funny headline, I think, especially in the last week. This has been getting like quite a lot of attention. But this contest coincides with International Bat Week. So it’s an annual event dedicated to raising awareness and appreciation for bats, and their vital role in the ecosystem. But I think it’s also an opportunity to have a deeper conversation about bats and what we can do to protect them. So I think that being able to shift public perception to view bats as valuable parts of the ecosystem is essential for their conservation.

I think by holding the beauty contest, hopefully we can work to dispel some myths and provide accurate information. I remember reading a study where participants who indicated that they had a better knowledge of bats, had a more positive attitude towards bats. So, one of the biggest challenges for bat conservation is trying to shift that public perception of them.

Miller: Is the fact that this bat week, internationally, happens right around Halloween … is it because of the spooky feeling that some people have about them, or is there something about mid-fall that is important for bats?

Busk: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I mean, there’s nothing that’s substantially happening with bats in the fall, aside from some of them start to migrate south for the winter where prey populations are more abundant. We have a couple of migratory bat species here in Oregon, including hoary bats, which is the species of Hoary Potter. But I think that historically, and through media, bats have been associated with Halloween, with the spookiness, with kind of the cultural mix of vampirism – that’s kind of the representation that they’ve gotten. So, yeah, I think it’s more associated with the spooky, cultural representation of that, rather than what is actually biologically or ecologically happening to them.

Miller: You submitted photographs of two different bats that you took this year for this contest, and the one that was named Hoary Potter, that’s the one that won. What can you tell us about him, or I assume it’s a him?

Busk: Yes, it is a male.

Miller: OK. What can you tell us about this guy?

Busk: So hoary bats are one of my favorite bat species. Like I mentioned earlier, they’re migratory, so they migrate south during the winter months. They’ll gather along the coast and in Northern Mexico, and then they’ll return to their foraging and breeding grounds in Oregon in the spring. A fun fact about hoary bats is that they usually bear twins. So most bats just have one pup every year, but they’ll usually have twins.

And then another thing with hoary bats, too, is that they’re on the Oregon conservation strategy species list, and so essentially what we know about hoary bats right now is that their populations are declining. They are generally associated with forest habitats. They’ll use these late successional conifer forests for roosting, but I think one of the bigger threats of bats right now is they have a lower reproductive rate. So usually species with lower reproductive rates and longer life spans are more threatened, if they have a slower population growth rate.

With hoary bats, particularly, they’re substantially affected by wind energy and collisions with wind turbines. In a simulated population of 2.25 million hoary bats, there was a 50% risk of decline by 2028. And so hoary bats are killed due to wind turbine blades. And I think that being able to talk about hoary bats, through the image of Hoary Potter is really important because bats are elusive, they’re nocturnal. Most people don’t interact with them unless it’s usually in the context of more of this human wildlife conflict of a bat flying into their house or having to mitigate with bats roosting in their attics. So I think it’s an important opportunity to talk about the plight of hoary bats in general and the threats that they’re facing.

Miller: How did you get this photo?

Busk: We were out collecting data on bats. One survey method, when you are collecting data on bats, is called misnetting. So you deploy this nylon net across either a body of water or you can do it underneath a bridge. And essentially those bats will fly into those, into the net. They’re very good at avoiding nets too. So there is some sampling bias with species in the area that you deploy the nets. But bat’s will fly into the net. We’ll kind of quickly extract them, and then we will process all of the data on them, usually like forearm measurement, reproductive status, sex, species, and then we’ll quickly release them. I was very excited to catch a hoary bat this year, like very, very, very excited. So I really wanted to get a photo.

Miller: Had you not caught one before?

Busk: I hadn’t, no. And so I was … like when I tell you that I was just over the moon, I was just so, so excited. Their fur just makes my brain so happy, like they’re so vibrant and they have this great, dense, grizzled, frosted fur. And they’re our largest species here in Oregon. Their wingspan extends up to 16 inches and they’re just so, so, so beautiful. And so I was so excited to catch a hoary bat and all of my coworkers noticed too. Like I was just, yeah, wild.

Miller: Oh, that actually sounds more exciting, that fact for you, than the fact that the photo of this bat won the contest. I mean, for you, the real prize was holding this little furry, flying mammal in your hands.

Busk: Yeah. And getting a great photo is always a treat, too, because with bats, there’s kind of all of these perfect circumstances that have to align. One, you have to catch the species. Bats are very good at dodging us. And then two, some bats are more or less cooperative for photos, and this bat was incredibly cooperative, and I was very thankful for that. And bats don’t understand what’s going on when you’re collecting all of this data. And so it was kind of the perfect set of circumstances that allowed me to get a great photo.

Miller: What can you tell us about Honey Bunches of Myotis? Which I should say is the name for the other bat that you took a picture of that was submitted for this contest.

Busk: Yeah, that’s correct. So Honey Bunches of Myotis is a long-eared myotis, another species that’s native to Oregon. And so they have these incredibly long ears, and those large ears help them hear and locate prey, and generate lift while they’re flying. So they’ll catch flies, moss, wasps, and they like to forage in these openings in dense forests. But they’ll also use manmade structures, including mines and bridges to roost under.

And Honey Bunches of Myotis is a female and she was also very cooperative, and very sweet. I think that an important part of photographing bats is being able to share positive images, if you’re especially going to share them online anywhere. We don’t want to perpetuate any negative narratives around bats. And so being able to take photos of, and share photos online of bats that really represents them in a positive way, I think it’s really important to just be able to dispel a lot of those myths, and just continue to educate people on how important bats are.

Miller: And when you say positive, you mean ways that might make somebody think, “oh, that’s cute,” as opposed to it’s tiny, little teeth are showing in a way that makes somebody scared, for example.

Busk: Yeah, exactly. Because I think that the bad rap that bats get is through the kind of cultural myths that are perpetuated online, or about being portrayed as symbols of evil or vampires in literature, in media. You know, what I think people fear with bats, they mostly might think of vampire bats, which actually only make up a small fraction of the species.

Miller: And none in Oregon, right?

Busk: Yeah. None in Oregon. They’re really found in Central and South America, and they usually just feed on livestock, and they actually have some really fascinating behaviors. But anyways, I think those exaggerated associations are with mostly vampire bats. And of course, fear of disease, I think is also associated with that, despite the risk of bat to human disease transmission being very low … especially when you’re avoiding direct contact, it’s exponentially lower.

And then another one that I hear, too, is when bats fly into people’s homes – I think that that flight pattern, because it can appear very erratic, makes people think that they’re unpredictable or aggressive. But in reality, they’re just trying to navigate their surroundings and they’re using echolocation. It’s like they want to avoid people as much as I think people want to avoid them, in some sense. So the misunderstanding about behavior is another thing that fuels that.

Miller: If all of what you’ve said is not enough to convince somebody who is bat-apprehensive, what can you tell us about how many mosquitoes they might eat?

Busk: Well, in general, we have a little brown bat here in Oregon that can consume hundreds of mosquitoes in a night, and that plays a huge role in agricultural pest control. And they save farmers billions of dollars a year, every year in that pest control and also by reducing pesticide usage. So here, especially in the U.S. and in Oregon, bats are providing so many ecosystem services to people. And I think being able to emphasize these ecological benefits that bats provide can help reshape their reputation.

Miller: Emma Busk, thanks so much and congratulations again.

Busk: Thank you so much for having me.

Miller: Emma Busk is a wildlife technician in the BLM’s Ashland field office. She is the one who took the picture of Hoary Potter and the Guano of Fire, who has won the Bat Beauty Contest run by the Bureau of Land Management this year.

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