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With Halloween on the horizon, skeletons, pumpkins and ghosts are appearing all over the Midpeninsula. But there’s one harbinger of Halloween that sticks around in Palo Alto year-round — bats.
Longtime Palo Alto resident Pamela Weiss is one of a few Palo Altans who reported a bat encounter at her home this month. While the sighting seems rare, experts say the winged creatures are actually more common in this area and less dangerous to humans than you might expect. And they serve a vital role in the wellbeing of our environment.
Weiss said she was sitting down for dinner with family and had just closed the screens covering her backyard porch to keep bugs out when she saw what she thought were small birds flying in circles inside her porch. But a closer look revealed that the birds were actually bats, and they settled down just long enough for her to take a picture.
“I've lived here more than 26 years and never saw any,” she told this publication via email.
Weiss said she’s normally careful about watching out for small animals like cats or birds getting stuck around her house, but now she’s adding bats to the list as well.
“The bravest of us ventured outside and reopened the screened doors,” she said. “They eventually fled the scene, poor things.”
Mike Belcher has lived in Palo Alto for 30 years and also recently — and for the first time — encountered bats in his backyard on Middlefield Road.
“It was dusk, and there were two or three flying around our trees, darting and circling as bats do,” he told this publication. “They were there for at least 10 minutes until it became dark and I went inside.”
Matt Sharp Chaney, a biologist with the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, said 15 species of bats are native to the Bay Area and around Palo Alto. In fact, Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a bill last week designating the pallid bat — a species of bat native to North America — to be California’s state bat.
Bats are “as diverse as Californians,” the bill reads.
Chaney said the recent sightings are to be expected during this time of year, since in the fall most bats usually leave their “maternity roosts” — where they raise their newborn pups through the summer — to find a new home for the winter with more consistently cooler temperatures. Bats prefer different types of homes during this time, including caves, cave-like structures in buildings, or hollowed out trees.
“That's kind of like a little mini hibernation, where they can kind of lower their heart rate, lower their breathing, and basically go inactive for a period of time, and then wake back up from that whenever they need to,” he said.
The National Wildlife Federation reported that these migration patterns could play a role in the animal’s association with Halloween because they are often in closer proximity to humans during the same time each year.
Chaney said it’s also possible that bats have been more visible around the Bay Area recently because of the higher-than-usual rainfall last winter, which caused an increase in vegetation and a corresponding increase in insect availability. Since bats are insectivores, there could be more food options available to them this fall, he said.
“They could be showing up in areas that you maybe hadn't seen them before,” he said.
But seeing more bats in the area is not as concerning as their spooky reputation might lead us to believe — Chaney said bats play “essential” roles in the ecosystem because of the rate at which they consume pests. Healthy bat populations help limit the need for insecticides on farms and have likely saved the agricultural industry billions of dollars every year.
Chaney said concerns about bats spreading rabies are often “overblown,” with only 2% to 4% of the bat population actually testing positive for rabies. Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation actually found that 99% of human rabies cases come from dogs, rather than bats.
However, rabid bats have been found in open space preserves in the area — one in August in Foothills Nature Preserve and, last year, another in the Palo Alto Baylands, according to animal control staff.
Anyone who encounters a bat should exercise caution and avoid direct contact with the animal, Chaney said.
“Just appreciate the bat and then go ahead and move on,” he said.
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