TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV)— Indiana State University’s Center for Bat Research, outreach, and conservation is holding its annual bat festival this weekend.
This is the 20th year for this event and even though this is a yearly event, plans for this year’s bat fest began two years ago. It is free for the community to come and enjoy and is family-friendly. people will be able to enjoy live bat encounters, bat-related artwork and merchandise, and even a live reptile and amphibian show.
Dr. Rusty Gonser is the Department Chair for the Biology Department at ISU and he mentioned that something different this year from previous years is that the students at ISU will be very involved in this year’s event.
“We’re going to have a creative writing group reading poetry that they did earlier in the week, inspired by bats; they’ll have a reading of that,” Dr. Gonser said. “We’re also going to have a string quartet from the school of music, they’re going to be playing bat-inspired music as one of our sessions. Then in the children’s room, we’re going to have our theater students doing a dramatic reading of the children’s book Stellaluna.”
Dr. Gonser also discussed what will go on during the evening session at Dobbs Park.
“We’re going to have outdoor activities, so we’ll show them what researchers use in terms of mist nets,” Dr. Gonser said. “How we might catch bats to tag them, mark them, follow them, transmitters, will have listing devices, so you can hear bats. We’ll have other activities involved with bats. There’ll be children’s activities as well. Our whole goal is just to educate people about bats and their lifestyles.”
Doors open at 10:00 a.m. and there will be several things people can enjoy during it. Some of the all-day activities include live bat shows, live reptiles and amphibians shows, the School of Music at ISU will have a string quartet performing bat-inspired music, and there will be bat-themed poems and stories read during it. There will also be bat-themed artwork to enjoy, bat merchandise, T-shirts and books for sale, and even a “Batty” themed photo area for the family to enjoy, and many more things going on.
As part of the 20th anniversary of the Bat Festival will also feature a multidisciplinary group exhibition called BAT will take place on October 2nd from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. that night. There will be drawings from Shawn E. Russell, video art from Barry R. Jones, and selected work from the Indiana State University Permanent Art Collection. This will be held at the Turman Gallery in the Fine Arts Building at Indiana State. To learn more about the bat festival and everything going on with it, click here.
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