The adventures of bat boy: Gettin’ down with the Tippy Dam bats

Last month, I wrote a column about removing a bat from my house. If you missed it, here’s a quick recap: I basically saw the bat fluttering around the kitchen of my Manistee house, pulled on a pair of gloves and waited for the little guy to land before gently picking him up to release outside.
I also recounted that I hid in a room with the door closed for a few minutes before mustering up the courage to perform the task.
Little did I know that in a few weeks I’d be surrounded by 20,000 bats. This time there would be no rooms to hide in, no doors to close.
I’ll admit, I was a little wary while descending into the depths of Tippy Dam, and it wasn’t because I was on a ladder a hundred or so feet above the river.
That was frightening, but the thought of that many bats at the bottom of the ladder did make me shudder. There were, after all, enough bats to grab hold of my coat, lift me up and fly me out of their hibernaculum.
“We’re trying to sleep!” they would chirp at me.
But the bats were well-behaved, gracious hosts.
On March 6, I followed Dr. Allen Kurta, a professor of biology at Eastern Michigan, and his class down into the spillway, which doubles as the only bat hibernaculum in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.
I’m sure you’ve been to Tippy, or have seen pictures. Getting down to where the bats hibernate involves getting on top of the dam and crawling down a ladder that’s dangerous enough to have a cage around it. The cage is there because if you slipped, you could fall a hundred feet into a concrete pit. The ladder is on the face of the dam, the part that stops all the water on the Manistee River. Going down, you become face to face with the lake-like body of water behind the dam.
“Just keep going,” the Consumers Energy workers hollered at us from up top. “Don’t stop and look at the water!”
After reaching a platform, getting to the bat lair involves another ladder trip down into the belly of the spillway.
Halfway down, the sunlight began to disappear. Since we aren’t equipped with echolocation like bats -- who, contrary to belief, can also see quite well -- some sort of artificial light was needed.
Like all of Dr. Kurta’s students, I had on a hard hat and safety glasses. The class and I were also treated to a 20-minute video about the dangers of confined spaces before we were allowed in the spillway. An affable Consumers employee strapped a very bright headlamp to my hard hat before I went down.
I’m glad he did. As I reached the bottom of the ladder, I stopped where I was because the dark was so disorienting. The spillway is the darkest place I’ve ever barely seen. I didn’t see any bats yet because I couldn’t see at all.
All the water pressing the walls behind us made the chambers very moist, cold and humid, which is why the bats are drawn to hibernate there. I felt it seeping in around my bones. Still, all I saw was black, then the palsied shaking of the students’ flashlights deep down in the dark.
I heard the bats before I saw them, a symphony of high-pitched squeaking and chirping. The ground beneath my feet was slimy with guano.
But I still couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything.
Then, I remembered to flick my light on. A beam burst narrowly in front of my helmet. I could at least navigate now. I moved forward, down the wide walkway to where the students were. Looking at the ground, I saw the slimy concrete was a greenish color. The cement path was as wide as a sidewalk, but with railings on each side because it dropped down fifty or so feet on either side. The side walls angled up like an attic. I started moving my head to throw light on the walls, thinking that there sure were a lot of holes.
When I fixed my headlamp on one, I realized it wasn’t a hole at all, but a giant grouping of hibernating bats. Hundreds of them.
They will surely fly into my head, I thought. One will surely gnaw me on the tip of my nose, I worried. They will have to call a stretcher to haul me out of there.
Why did I think this?
Because culturally, bats have a bad rep. They are associated with blood-sucking vampires, insanity and rabies. Some folks consider them nothing more than flying rats who want to get tangled up in your hair or nibble on your toes while you sleep.
In the end, they are not just harmless, but helpful, eating more than their weight in mosquitos each summer night.
As I continued to explore the hibernaculum with the helpful Dr. Kurta and his students, I slowly realized that there was nothing to be afraid of. The bats that zipped and zoomed by my head never even came close to touching me. The more I learned about bats, the more comfortable I became around them.
So, my days of hiding from bats are over.
If only I could say the same for very steep ladders.