Fall nights keep me looking for wildlife in my backyard way past sunset. The owls that serenade lightning bugs are a common sound in the night air. Their soft hooting encourages me to join in. I can imitate their call and often find they will answer me and move closer.

Dusk can bring another winged visitor to our neighborhood. We have bats! The bats soar low on the horizon to catch unsuspecting mosquitoes and insects. We are lucky to have these predators, but my gratitude stops when they invade my house as they once did when I lived in an old, two-story farm house. We had bats there that wanted to set up housekeeping in my living room. The evening I spotted a bat hanging from a picture frame made me so squeamish that I called my son's babysitter (an 80-year-old naturalist) to rescue us. She calmly fetched a bed sheet, trapped the small bat, and released it outdoors.

My next bat encounter in that house came one summer morning. I awoke to find a bat staring at me. It was hanging upside down on my curtains, just above my head. Never have I bolted out of bed so fast. I called my dad who drove across town, got a broom, and swept the invader out of the house. I later discovered bats were roosting in that attic.

When I spotted bats at our new house, I learned to enjoy these night flyers from afar. Each of our neighbors has installed bat houses. We want the mosquitoes gone. Thank heavens bats have not found an opening in our ranch house's attic.

Before I lay the subject of bats to rest, a few facts:

For more information, there is an excellent online resource: Bat Conservation International at www.batcon.org. You can learn more about bachelor colonies, bat houses, attracting bats, and environmental impacts on bats. Like bees, bats are on the minds of those in the scientific community. There have recently been die-offs of tens of thousands of hibernating bats in the northeastern United States due to "white-nose syndrome" (WNS).

If you spot bats in your backyard, you may want to put up a bat box and become a friend of bats. You will learn that "blind as a bat" is not accurate, but "bats in your belfry" is.