Riverside’s parks and recreation department wants to show you just how many kinds of wildlife move through the area with an upcoming program dedicated to an underrated member of the animal kingdom.
A guided bat tour for all ages will take place near the Scout Cabin after dark later this month, Recreation Supervisor Alyssa Szymanski told the Landmark.
“The whole point of the bat hike is to give people a better understanding of these animals and how incredibly important they are to our ecosystem. With a lot of animals that aren’t cute, fluffy, more appealing visually, there’s a lot of incorrect information about animals out there,” she said. “[Bats are] out all the time, and I think people just don’t realize that they’re even there.”
Szymanski said she had run similar programs before when she worked for the Forest Preserve District of Will County. The guided tour will feature Amy Godbey, a naturalist with a focus on studying and educating about bats.
“She is like the head volunteer for our bat programs at Will County Forest Preserves. She is also very heavily involved in citizen scientist work with bat monitoring at places like the Lincoln Park Zoo,” Szymanski said. “She is definitely a number one bat advocate, and she’s amazing.”
The guided tour had originally been scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 8, but it had to be rescheduled due to a death in Godbey’s family, Szymanski said. The new date is still in the works.
Szymanski said Godbey will bring her “bat backpack” that can pick up on the high-frequency sounds bats emit in order to navigate by echolocation, in which they bounce sound waves off their environment to detect items in space. The backpack can discern what kind of bat emitted the sound and pull up a photo of another member of the species, Szymanski said.
“The human ear cannot hear it. It’s too high of a frequency, but on the iPad, you can play it back and see the soundwaves,” she said.
Szymanski said the goal of the program is to educate the public about bats and give people a newfound appreciation for them.
“Usually, we get asked within the first five minutes all of the bat myths that [people] have heard and debunk those myths,” she said. “Our bats are dying, unfortunately. White nose syndrome, if it’s something you have ever heard of, is a fungus that goes onto their nose and makes them have a white nose, and it gets into their respiratory system, and they die.”
Szymanski said entire colonies of bats can be wiped out by white nose syndrome, which is a net loss for the ecosystem. She said bats play important roles as pollinators for some plants while their excrement can be used as fertilizer for plants.
“They also help eat and control some of those nasty bugs that we don’t want, those mosquito populations and some moth populations, even though moths are important as well,” she said. “Bats in other places, different species eat fruits. They’re eating those fruits, they’re eating those seeds, and they’re helping pollinate and disperse seeds. They’re a very important species to the Illinois ecosystem, and the whole intention is to share how great these guys are.”
She also encouraged Riverside residents to attend and enjoy the experience of navigating at night without lighting.
“I encourage everybody I meet, even if you’re walking around the streets of Riverside … to try it out. It is a very unique experience, especially doing it for the first time. Your eyesight does adjust,” she said. “It almost gives you that real feeling of, I’m like an owl or a bat or these creatures who are out and awake and thriving at night, hunting and communicating with each other and other species.”
