E N D A G E R E D   S P E C I E S

  When you get called out of bed to go to the maternity hospital in the middle of the night, it's because you're an expectant father or a doctor. Unless you're Zoltan Bihari, batbuster.

  "They always called me and said, please come and take away these bats," laughs Bihari, recalling his student days at Debrecen University in southern Hungary. The panelled hospital in Debrecen was a popular bat hangout, and expectant mothers were less than thrilled to see a bat enter the maternity ward as they were going into labour. Bihari, as a budding bat expert who could capture the strays, was in demand.

  Bihari is now an Assistant Professor at the Agricultural University of Debrecen, and he's no longer on call at the hospital. Especially since he taught the staff to catch their own bats.

  "The first time I went there, the doctors and nurses ran away, saying the bat was dangerous. 'Oh, it's terrible, disgusting,' they said. When I had been there several times, I showed them it's not dangerous. It was a very small bat. After that, a few days later, they said 'it's nice, it's not too dangerous,'" recalls Bihari. "Then they called me and said, 'Zoli, come because we caught three bats.' So they caught the bats and were not afraid," he says proudly.

  The rest of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has yet to make this leap of faith. Bats are reviled as a messy nuisance or a sinister omen, and most people don't realise that they are actually threatened. In Hungary alone, there are 26 species of protected bats. They are all in regular danger of being killed, poisoned or driven out of their habitat.

  "They live close to people, this is the problem," says Bihari, who has been studying bats for the past 14 years. He works with the Hungarian Bat Conservation Foundation and the Hungarian Bat Researchers' Club, tracking the migration of bats across Central and Eastern Europe with other bat specialists throughout the region.

  Bats live in apartment blocks, churches, caves, mines and forests. Most bat species live in large colonies together, rotating around various roosts at different times of the year, looking for a dark and quiet place to hibernate and reproduce. They are vulnerable in all their homes. The dead trees they frequent in the forests are being rapidly removed as forestry companies extend their activities. The church windows they fly into are covered with wire to keep out pesky pigeons. The caves they sleep in during the winter are shaken and lit up by cave-explorers.

  The threat of tourists and other explorers entering the caves is a particularly bad problem, since bats live off their body fat in the winter. Anything that causes them to wake up and fly around can deplete their stored-up energy to the point that they don't survive until spring. Bihari says the human explorers don't mean to do harm. They just need to be educated.

  Because bats travel in large groups, a problem that affects one affects many. There used to be huge colonies of one particular species, the Miniopterus bat, throughout Europe, including a 100,000-strong group in Hungary. But human activities are causing these bats to recede further and further east. Eastern Hungary is currently the farthest west they can be found.

  "I think we have to protect this species in the eastern part of Europe and if it's possible, maybe these bats will go back to the other countries," says Bihari. The Foundation is working with groups throughout Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine on an international Miniopterus Project to protect this bat species from encroachment. The Project is one of the initiatives undertaken as part of the Bonn Convention on migratory species. In 1994, three CEE countries (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) became signatories to the European Bat Agreement, which aims to protect all 31 bat species identified in Europe. Other CEE countries have expressed interest in signing on.

  So, what's next for Batman? Maybe helping owls, despite the fact that owls occasionally feast on bats. "They are very endangered, so we have to protect them," sighs Bihari. Then he laughs at how partisan he sounds. "We like the owls too, not just the bats!"

  For more info: Miniopterus Project, Hungary, (36-46) 336-831, hunbat@mail.matav.hu; Hungarian Bat Researchers Club, (36-60) 311-459; Bat Research and Protection Group, Bulgaria, (359-2) 466-558, rabbits@main.infotel.bg.