Our TOWN-Austin monthly meeting occurs each month on the fourth Tuesday.
Our agenda is typically the following: bring your brown-bag dinner or a snack; we gather at 6 pm & socialize; 6:30-7:00 greetings, introductions, business, outings reports and planning; 7- 8 speaker; 8 – 8:15 adjournment and cleanup.
Our speaker will be Dianne Odegard from the Austin Bat Refuge who will talk about Living Among Bats.
Though among the most poorly understood and needlessly feared of all animals, the almost 1400 bat species worldwide are beneficial to human interests as diverse as agriculture, forestry, tourism and medicine. Whether consuming vast numbers of damaging insect pests (saving agriculture across the U.S. an average of $22.9 billion a year), pollinating plants important to local economies or dispersing seeds critical to restoration of rain forests, bats are undeniably important, and unfortunately under threat of harm from sources both old and new.
Human fear of bats has existed for centuries, and sometimes seems to be the most intractable threat of all, based almost entirely on myth, exaggeration and misinformation.
Dianne Odegard is President and Co-Founder, along with her husband, Lee Mackenzie, of Austin Bat Refuge, a non-profit organization focused on local education and outreach, and on rehabilitation and release of injured and orphaned bats.
She studied graphic art in college, but has always been fascinated by bats, and by the various ways humans respond to them. Working for Bat Conservation International from 2005 until June of this year, she immersed herself in bat biology, bats and public health, bats in buildings, and in conservation education for children and adults. She has shared her knowledge with a wide range of audiences in Texas and beyond as BCI’s urban bats specialist.
Dianne and Lee share their home with Zoey and Zuzu, BCI’s retired Ambassador Bats (African straw-colored fruit bats) and, as state-permitted wildlife rehabilitators, with as many as 60 native Texas bats of nine different species.
Join us and bring a friend!