Bats are in trouble. But Middle Georgia has become their refuge from a deadly disease.

When Rebekah “Ratty” Tuck explains her job to other people, she’s not surprised by their reactions.

“When you tell people you work with bats, you either get, ‘Oh, that’s so cool and interesting. How’d you get into that?’ or ‘Eww,’” said Tuck, a bat technician with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. “I always rebuttal with, ‘Well, do you like bugs? Do you like mosquitoes?’”

Though not everyone is passionate about the mosquito-chomping mammals, the bat population in North America is down an estimated 92 percent since 2006, when a fungal disease called white nose syndrome started wiping out entire caves of bats in New England.

One recent evening, Tuck, 23, had set up a mist net between two 20-foot-tall metal poles on each side of Walnut Creek for the last of a two-year-long series of bat surveys at the Ocmulgee National Monument. She’ll be here for a few more weeks finishing the surveys, which are a larger effort by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to establish a baseline for bat species and their habitats at this crucial time.

Tuck and two others waited quietly in the dark bogs for an unsuspecting bat to fly into the net.

“Bats are really in trouble right now,” said Jacalyn Beck, a bat research coordinator with the DNR. “We got white nose in Georgia in 2013. It is not in (Middle) Georgia, so we’re hoping that our bat species that occur in the South and as well as the North, they might be able to find kind of a safe haven down here.”

Results from the survey won’t shed light on the number of bats, but it will reveal what species are living here when and what habitats they’re using. The current survey, which involves other methods including ultrasonic echolocation, began in May.

Crew members check the nets about every 10 minutes over a four-hour period. On one check they caught two bats: an eastern red bat and an evening bat.

Wearing batting gloves, Tuck shines a light through the wings of the bat, determining its age by the opacity of its joints. She allows the bat to nibble on her fingers while she weighs it and measures its wingspan. All bat technicians, by the way, have had rabies vaccinations.

“I try to explain to people, people think they’re just flying rats. I hear that all the time,” Tuck said. “I’m like, ‘Up close, they actually look like the mixture of little tiny bear cubs and puppies with wings.’”

This story was originally published July 19, 2016 at 5:54 PM with the headline "Bats are in trouble. But Middle Georgia has become their refuge from a deadly disease.."