CLARKSVILLE -- Stirring up billows of dust in the stifling heat, Heidi Hughes followed her flashlight beam around the attic of a 200-year-old farmhouse here last week in an effort to rescue a few of America's most misunderstood mammals.
The 44-year-old naturalist and co-founder of the American Bat Conservation Society was disappointed: All that was left of a small band of big brown bats was some dried-out corpses. Perhaps, she speculated, they were trapped and died when a heat wave raised temperatures in the stone attic, or they starved or were accidentally poisoned by eating insects killed with pesticides.
Even if some members of the colony of M. lucifugus survived, they were unlikely to return and rebuild.
"It's like a small city was wiped out," mourned Ms. Hughes.
But all was not lost. Ms. Hughes gently preached the gospel of bat conservation to homeowner Laura O'Keefe, 24, who discovered she had bats when two blundered into her upstairs hallway.
She and her husband, Eric, raced around chasing the creatures until they darted out a window. She called the Howard County animal control office, which referred her to the American Bat Conservation Society.
Bats, Ms. Hughes told Mrs. O'Keefe, don't deserve their reputation as sinister, diseased vermin that nip children and deliberately get tangled in people's hair. (It's a popular notion: Batman, after all, adopted his costume to frighten criminals).
Instead, she said, they are are cuddly creatures, as harmless as butterflies, that consume vast quantities of annoying insects. "I don't think I've ever met a bat I didn't really like," Ms. Hughes said.
Mrs. O'Keefe, whose family lives on a 155-acre farm, was leery at first. But by the time Ms. Hughes prepared to leave, Mrs. $H O'Keefe said she was disappointed the colony was wiped out.
And because of Ms. Hughes' visit, she confided: "I'm a little less afraid of them."
Ms. Hughes, the president of the Wild Bird in Rockville, and Dr. Thomas Valega, an administrator with the National Institutes of Health, founded the non-profit bat conservation group last year.
Working out of their Rockville bungalow, the couple leads twilight bat-watching hikes, publishes newsletters, and gives talks featuring their collection of live bats. They have helped mount more than 50 missions by "bat rescue squads."
They've built the society into what may be the nation's second most prominent bat education group, after the larger Bat Conservation International of Austin, Texas.
