On the deserted edge of Freshkills on Staten Island, winged shadows swooped through night sky. Wearing a headlamp, Danielle Fibikar, a wildlife biologist and an educator at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, adjusted the nets she had set out to catch bats.



And the bats were certainly out on this recent night — indistinct and inaudible though they were. Ultrasonic chirps registered on an Anabat detector strapped to the wrist of Alice Gorlenko, a senior majoring in biology at the College of Staten Island, who helped monitor the Dumpster-lined dirt service road where the nets stood. Just as Ms. Fibikar turned to join a group of other students, two Eastern red bats stole past overhead, narrowly missing her traps.

“Really?” exclaimed Ms. Fibikar, with simultaneous frustration and delight. Her headlamp beamed up toward their traceless path. “I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “They’re very smart animals.”

For what they lack in cuddly charm, bats are also essential to ecosystems. As pollinators and agricultural pest-eaters, they’re valued at $3 billion a year for U.S. farmers. In New York City, where nine species of bats are known to migrate during the summer, a single little brown bat is capable of devouring up to 100 percent of its body weight in insects, a diet that includes mosquitoes.