May the best bat win.
The Bureau of Land Management is hosting its fifth annual bat beauty contest in celebration of bat week, pitting some of the most popular winged creatures of the night against each other.
The contest is a two-pronged effort to celebrate the spookiest time of year while also furthering efforts to protect bats as they face increased threats of habitat loss, disease, and light pollution, the bureau’s wildlife technician Emma Busk said.
Busk specifically highlighted the many misconceptions levied against bats, including a false propensity for diseases like rabies.
“There’s a lot of fear and misconceptions around bats, but less than 1% of all bat populations actually carry rabies, and the bat-to-human disease transmission is actually really low,” Busk said.
The beauty contest originally started in 2019 to boost awareness of the bat’s ecological importance, similar to other viral celebrations like Fat Bear Week. The federal agency shares pictures of the contestants on its Facebook and Instagram accounts and lets the public decide which of the bats is the cutest.
All of the featured bats are part of wild populations and live on public land, but are photographed and named by the agency staff.
The bats’ names can play a larger role in the contest than their cuteness.
Last year’s winner was a female Townsend’s big-eared bat from southern Oregon dubbed “William ShakespEAR”. In 2022, however, a homely canyon bat named “Barbara” from southern Oregon claimed victory.
This year, Busk is rooting for “Hoary Potter,” a hoary bat from Oregon that she photographed for the contest. Her favorite-to-win was pitted against Townsend’s big-eared bat named “Sir Flaps-A-Lot” from Utah on Thursday.
Neither species is listed as endangered, but Oregon has both on a list of species in need of conservation attention. Utah has done the same, but only for the Townsend big-eared bat.
“Our effort every year is to just collect as much data as we can on the species in our resource area, so that we do know how to better protect them moving forward,” Busk said.
Townsend big-eared bats like the one featured in the contest are known for their ears, as the name aptly suggests. Their ears can stretch up to 1.5 inches–nearly a third of their average full body size.
The hoary bat earned its contest name for the species’ swift flight and camouflage ability, making it “the perfect candidate for seeker on this year’s Quidditch team,” the agency said.
The beauty contest is set to wrap up on Halloween this Thursday.
With Post Wires.