It should drive me batty, right?

I used to give bats no more thought than most folks do. They were just another interesting critter I caught fleeting glimpses of as they flitted about at dusk.

Then I moved to Malta, home to the northernmost colony of migrating little brown bats in North America, and I became intimately familiar with them. The 100-year-old stone house we bought there was bat central. Trim was missing on a couple of second-floor windows giving them entry into the house, and while remodeling the place I found guano packed tightly between the rafters.

I carried the guano out to the garden in 5-gallon buckets, trimmed the windows, and plugged all the obvious holes.

It made a difference, but until recently, we still had the occasional bat flying through the house. I became quite adept at catching them and releasing them outside.

Most folks are more mercenary. An elderly couple two doors down the street used to swat bats with badmitten racquets while watching television at night in their living room.

But I don’t like to kill things I can’t eat, and didn’t this pandemic start after some guy in China ate a bat? Or was it a pangolin?

I just learned to live with them. Awakening one summer night after a bat landed on my bare shoulder, I simply got up slowly and walked outside before brushing it off.

That was more than 10 years ago and I haven’t had a bat roost on me since. In fact bat numbers have dropped noticeably since then. I hoped they had moved on after my years of remodeling and plugging holes in the house, but it appears something more sinister may be in play.

The fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, a disease that is often fatal to bats, has been found in six eastern Montana counties.

In an interesting twist, state wildlife officials have temporarily prohibited the capture of bats for study because of a fear that researchers could transmit Covid-19 to the bats.

White-nose syndrome has been found in 35 states and seven Canadian provinces. It can wipe out entire colonies and has already killed an estimated 6.7 million bats.

Few people care. Bats aren’t a very loveable species, and because they are nocturnal, not a lot of folks would even miss them.

I hate to think the day may come when tiny flying mammals no longer swarm out of a cave in the Little Rocky Mountains each spring to fly north en masse to Malta and eat mosquitoes.

I would miss them.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]