Bat Love on the Upper West Side

By Bonnie Eissner

I’ve long relished Central Park for its biodiversity, especially its breathtaking flowers and trees and beautiful birds, but bats? The thought of the Upper West Side’s virtual backyard being a habitat for these strange creatures never crossed my mind until I read online about a bat walk in the park hosted by the Linnaean Society of New York, which offers free nature field trips and talks. 

My curiosity piqued, I signed up, and I wasn’t alone. The annual event drew a capacity crowd. Savannah Conheady, who lives in Hell’s Kitchen, passed up a friend’s cocktail party to attend her first bat walk. Cristina Cristian, from Astoria, came for her fourth. 

Danielle Gustafson led the walk with assistance from her husband Brad Klein. A self-described bat enthusiast, she started giving bat walks in Central Park 20 years ago after joining a friend on a natural history tour of the Brazilian Amazon, hosted by the New York Botanical Garden and Bat Conservation International, to net and observe bats. 

“I came out of the Amazon with this sense of ‘wow, bats are amazing, and now I want to learn everything I can about them,’” said Gustafson, who, when she’s not viewing bats, is the executive director of the EMS FDNY Help Fund, which supports the emergency medical technicians and paramedics of the FDNY. 

On the trip, she made the aquaintance of the board chair of Bat Conservation International, and, not long after, started sitting in on board meetings. 

Gustafson participated in her first Central Park bat walk with Kate Jones, a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who worked in “extinction forecasting,” specializing in bats. Gustafson, Jones, and other researchers and enthusiasts formed the New York Bat Group to learn more about the city’s little-studied bats. Jones returned home to England in 2005, but, shortly before, passed the bat-walking baton to Gustafson, who had no formal science training and hesitated at first. But Jones convinced her, saying there was a need for bat-friendly education, a change in bats’ perennially poor PR. “She gave me her PowerPoint,” Gustafson said, “and was like, “our motto is: Bats need friends.”

Gustafson embraced the slogan and has been leading bat walks ever since. 

The Linnaean Society walk started at 7:45 p.m. outside the American Museum of Natural History where Gustafson first spoke about bats and what we might see in the park.

Bats are the only mammals capable of powered flight, she explained, and are ecologically important. They not only eat large amounts of insects, but, in other regions, pollinate plants, such as bananas and agave, the source of tequila. Bats also outlive other mammals of their size. They can live up to 30 years, and most produce just one offspring a year. “Being a bat is like life in the slow lane,” Gustafson said.  

At night, bats hunt insects — mosquitoes, moths, and beetles. Contrary to rumors that bats fly into people’s hair, bats are frightened of humans and avoid them. If a bat flies close by, it’s likely seeking the insects that we attract.

Bats seem silent to people, but that’s only because the sounds they emit to map their environment via echolocation are at frequencies above what people can hear. Bat detectors allow people to hear bats’ ultrasonic sounds, and some devices, like the tiny Echo Meter Touch, a smartphone plug-in that Gustafson brought, even identify a likely bat species.

No one knows how many bats are in Central Park — a data deficiency that dismays Gustafson — but five bat species are known to frequent the park. There are three types of tree-roosting bats: eastern red bats (the most numerous), silver-haired bats, and hoary bats. Big brown bats and tricolored bats, who hibernate in caves in cold weather, also use the park.

With the sky still light, Gustafson and Klein guided the group into the park, watching for chimney swifts swooping above the trees. These tiny birds feast on insects. Their presence at sundown means that bats, which can consume a large portion of their body weight in insects each night, will be in the same spot later, Gustafson explained. 

We stopped first at Oak Bridge, which stretches across the Lake, to look and listen, via handheld bat detectors, which Gustafson distributed, for bats coming for a drink.

 No bats flew down to the Lake that night, but a family of raccoons taking a dip drew interest.

The evening livened up when we moved onto a small field, Burns Lawn, west of the Ramble. Sprawled on blankets, we watched as silhouetted bats darted and dove, hoovering insects. The experience was mesmerizing, like watching a silent airshow. We oohed and aahed as the elusive creatures flew overhead. The bat detectors chirped with each flyover, and Klein, who had an Echo Meter Touch, called out the species. Most were eastern red bats. In a rare event, a big brown bat and a silver-haired bat flew out together, wing on wing. 

Gustafson shared more bat facts between the sightings. 

Threats to bats like white-nose syndrome are concerning, she said. The fast-spreading fungal disease infects hibernating bats, causing them to wake up more frequently and, ultimately, starve from depleting their fat reserves. The syndrome has killed millions of bats and caused local extinctions of once numerous species, including little brown bats that used to visit Central Park. 

The dangers bats face from urbanization and deforestation make Gustafson, who is a board member of Bat Conservation International, especially interested in city bats. “I think urban bats are some of the most important,” she said. “As we urbanize the United States, it seems to me that we need to understand how to coexist. And if we understood how to conserve these bats in Central Park, that would give us a very good idea of how to conserve bats elsewhere in the United States.” 

She sees her walks as helping people look up and see bats. “If you’ve been in Central Park at night, there have been bats,” she said. “This idea of turning on the lights to see bats, I think there’s something really magical about that.” 

My fellow bat walkers and I agreed. “I just loved learning and walking through the park with all the fireflies and then seeing my first bat in Central Park,” Conheady told me. “Wow, how lucky are we? I almost got gratitude tears.” 

Interested Upper West Siders can look for local bats on warm nights at dusk in Central Park and Riverside Park, where they forage for insects. 

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