Dispelling myths about bats: through research, education, community involvement, and conservation efforts in Mexico and the United States, the stigma surrounding these mysterious and often misunderstood creatures is being reversed.

• Author: Hardman, Chris

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In small classrooms throughout Northern Mexico, school children are singing the praises of Marcelo, the Mexican free-tailed bat. On the other side of the border in the southern part of the United States, children are devoted to Frankie, the Brazilian free-tailed bat. Both bats live in both countries; they spend the winter in Mexico and they summer in the United States. And although they contribute greatly to the agricultural economy of each country, their presence sparks heated debates and sometimes violence. What many adults have yet to learn, however, these school children already know: bats are an essential part of the environment that directly benefit humans. They are the farmer's silent helpers, pollinating cash crops and providing pest control.

Marcelo came from the imagination of Laura Navarro, Education Coordinator for the Mexican non-governmental organization, the Bat Conservation Program (PCMM). With her bilingual children's book featuring Marcelo the friendly bat, Navarro challenges Mexican myths and superstitions by portraying bats as the peaceful, family-oriented mammals they are. Because Navarro believes that children learn better when they have an emotional attachment to a subject, she treats bats as a kind of pet or mascot and writes lively stories about them. "I think that information is not the [only] way to change. We need to go deeper," she explains.

Popular culture in Mexico--as in other countries of the Americas--portrays bats as blood-sucking vampires that prey on innocent people while they sleep. In the past, fear of these mysterious night creatures has led people to burn or dynamite the caves where they roost, killing millions of them. "It [was] the same everywhere," explains Navarro, "[people] think they are vampires." Lack of understanding and the ensuing violence prompted Mexico's foremost bat scientist Rodrigo Medellín to found PCMM in 1994. "When you start working with something like bats, that have an undeserved, unfair bad reputation, you have to start by improving the bats' image," Medellín says. As a professor at the Ecology Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Medellín had the resources and background to develop education-based programs that would change the image of bats in the eyes of the Mexican people.

To implement their strategy of conservation through education, PCMM programs begin in the classroom and then spread to the rest of the community. Over the years, PGMM has worked with approximately 70 of the communities that live near 22 of the most important bat caves in Mexico. Cave-dwelling animals that only come out at night are difficult for most people to see, and as a result, human residents know little about them. Navarro says she has met many people who think bats are mice or birds. "What we do in the program is to try to give them information about the real natural history of the species," she explains.

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Since publishing Marcelo the Bat in 1997, Navarro and her partner, Mexican artist Juan Sebastián, have published six more bilingual children's books about bats. Simple text and friendly drawings spark the reader's imagination as they learn about bat family life where mothers nurse their babies and colonies migrate together as one big group. Loveable bats, with...