Hoping to get a little batty this summer!

I was working in my garden last week when I heard the first mosquito of the season. He buzzed my ear, and in an unsuccessful attempt to squash him I slapped myself upside the head.

It will be long pants and long-sleeved shirts for yard work from now until the first frost.

I’ve never lived anywhere with the amount of mosquitos we have here in Malta. Last week the insecticide spray truck began making its nightly rounds in an effort to combat the buzzing swarms.

I suspect the bloodsuckers will be much worse this summer. The bats are nearly gone.

According to a recent Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks news release, the colony of little brown bats that migrate from the Little Rocky Mountains to Malta each spring has been devastated by disease. A count of the bats in Azure Cave this year found only 40 where there had been 1,500 to 1,700.

White-nose syndrome, a fungus that infects bats and is usually fatal, is the culprit.

Most folks won’t care about the thousands of mosquitos a single bat can eat in a night. They’ll simply be glad the flying mammals are gone.

Bats are about as popular as snakes with most folks.

Barb and I live in a house that’s more than a century old. I spent years patching holes and fixing loose trim that gave bats access to the inside. Chasing bats out of the house used to be a regular occurrence.

One summer when our oldest granddaughters were visiting and we had given them our bedroom and we were sleeping on the living room floor, I felt a bat land on my bare shoulder. By then I was used to close bat encounters. I got up slowly, walked out the back door, and brushed off the little critter.

That was 15 years ago. The bats have been in steady decline ever since. I don’t recall chasing a single bat out of the house last year.

Admittedly, I don’t miss the smell -- by which bats return to their old haunts -- or the droppings. However, I always enjoyed watching them fly.

I suppose this is just one more used-to-be as in Malta used to be home to the northernmost colony of migrating little brown bats. I had always hoped to just once see that swarm of bats flying from the mountains to town for the summer.

Now I stand here swatting mosquitos under an empty sky.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]