Programmer's Compassion Takes Flight with Bats

By VIC COX

Mary Wenzel was ending her workday at UCSB when the phone delivered a call for help. Though Wenzel is a programmer with the Information Systems and Computing Department (IS&C), the call was not about computers. It was from the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network about a bat trapped in a Macy's storeroom at the Paseo Nuevo Mall.

While she is not often asked to rescue the flying mammals, Wenzel is one of the few people in the area who is licensed and trained to do so, she said. She has also been vaccinated against rabies.

The Mexican free-tailed bat had been trapped in an empty clothes bin by an alert female security guard, who realized that the animal had wandered into unknown territory and exhausted itself trying to get out. After Wenzel talked to the Macy's guard, she pulled on her gloves and inspected the little insect-eater. Finding no broken bones or other damage that would prevent flight--wing membranes are spread by a bat's slender finger bones--Wenzel decided it was safe to take the captive a few miles out of town to release it.

She picked a spot near a roost of the same species, which is common to the South Coast, but Wenzel admits she could not be certain that this female bat belonged to this roost. "Free-taileds travel high, fast, and far, so if she was determined to get back to the mall, she could," the Wisconsin native said with puckish humor.

More seriously, she noted that a bigproblem for human researchers and rehabilitators is the difficulty in identifying a bat's home roost. Bat mothers and pups, on the other hand, recognize each other out of a colony of thousands by their cries and smell. Currently, Wenzel is constructing a Web site <www.batcalls.org> where professionals, or amateurs like her, can share actual bat calls and information. "It's the first time I've been able to apply my work skills to helping bats," she said.

The IS&C programmer, who walked off with a Staff Citation of Excellence last academic year, has been at UCSB since 1997. She cross-references and organizes data to allow users to seek answers from several databases at the same time. An example would be pulling together spending trends over several years to improve budget forecasts.

Her fascination with bats stems from a 1994 bird-watching trip to Queensland, Australia, with husband Brad Hacker, professor of geological sciences. "We were laying on our backs, looking into these eucalyptus, and suddenly I saw that they were full of spectacled flying foxes, which are out during the day," she recalled. "Some of them had pups tucked under their arms. They were just hanging there, these big, beautiful animals with enchanting expressions."

If it was love at first sight, it quickly transferred to other bats with less canine features and nocturnal habits. The more she learned, the more she realized that bats were admirable creatures, beneficial to human crops and health, but had an undeserved reputation for malevolence. Like dogs, raccoons, and skunks, bats are infected and killed by rabies. They should not be handled if found on the ground. But available research counters the misperception that bats spread rabies.

Wenzel traces her concern for the furry flyers to her general love for animals, especially mammals. She has three cats and a horse at home. "I think," she said, "it is a great treat to see wildlife."