OC's Batwoman Has Made Studying Bats Her Profession

Stephanie Remington is all about bats in Orange County. She's dedicated her career to them.

Armed with her trusty bat detector -- a device that tracks the inaudible radar tones bats make to navigate -- Remington leads educational programs and talks. It's safe to say she may be the county's leading bat evangelist.

"Bats make one to 500 sounds per second when they're flying," she told a group gathered at San Clemente's Casa Romantica Thursday evening. "Imagine running four to 11 hours and singing at the top of your lungs. That's not even a fraction of the energy a bat uses."

That's why one bat colony in Texas has to consume an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 pounds of insects in a night, depending on whether it's breeding season, Remington said.

"Bats are the principle insect predators worldwide," she said.

She pointed to a scientific study in which researchers released a little brown bat -- a common species back East -- into an enclosed tent with 1,000 mosquitoes. After just an hour, only 400 were left alive.

Remington said she's found 16 bat species in Orange County, but only two live in cities. There aren't many on the coast because species like pallid bats live in "prime human habitat," she said.

Drought and recurring forest fires in Orange County over the past decade have drastically reduced the bat population, not to mention development and light pollution that allows predators to eat bats they otherwise couldn't see, Remington said.

The declining bat population is problematic because bats consume huge numbers of pests and disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes, Remington said. Also, bats are what they call a dead-end host for diseases like West Nile -- they can contract it, but mosquitoes that bite them can’t transfer it to any other animal, Remington said.

Bats are also among the top pollinators for all kinds of fruit, Remington said. OC is home to a nectar-eating species, she added.

"There's huge ramifications for the loss of bat populations," she said.

Still, when Remington led her bat walkers down to Parque Del Mar in the Pier Bowl, her bat detector tracked down three or four bats right away, swooping in and out of the streetlights and circling against the twilit sky over the ocean.

Remington talks the bat talk, but also walks the bat walk. She warned people not to directly touch a bat they find on the ground or kill it -- scoop it up into a shoebox with air holes and call her.

"I'll either come get it myself or send someone to get it," she said.

For more info on local bat species, where to spot them and how to contact Remington, visit her website at OCBats.com.

All photos by Adam Townsend except where indicated.