🦇 Going Batty for Conservation! 🌿

Apparently, we should have brought more brochures.

Ouabache Land Conservancy Board Member Jami Delgado and a friend joined the 21st Annual Indiana Bat Festival at Indiana State University on September 26, sharing information about local land conservation, upcoming events, and ways to get involved—and by the end of the festival, there wasn't much left to pack up.

Visitors took every OLC brochure, annual report, and event flyer we brought. Even better, plenty of people stopped to talk, ask questions, and learn more about the places OLC protects throughout west-central Indiana.

Bats bring a crowd

The annual Indiana Bat Festival celebrates one of our region's most fascinating—and ecologically important—groups of wildlife while giving people an opportunity to learn more about bats, their habitats, and conservation.

That's a natural fit for OLC. Protecting woods, wetlands, prairies, waterways, and other natural areas means protecting habitat for the many species that depend on those places—including bats.

But the festival also gives OLC something equally valuable: an opportunity to meet people where they already are.

This year's crowd seemed especially enthusiastic, with steady interest at the OLC table and plenty of conversations about conservation close to home.

Just in time for October

The timing couldn't have been much better.

October is OLC's busiest month for events, so volunteers shared what's coming up and encouraging visitors to join us. Several people pulled out their calendars and made plans to attend upcoming programs on the spot.

The festival also happened to fall on National Public Lands Day, celebrated this year on September 26. The overlap felt fitting: a day celebrating bats and the habitats they depend on was also a day set aside nationally to celebrate and care for the outdoor places that belong to all of us.

That's exactly what we hope happens at community events like this. Someone might stop by because they came to learn about bats, then discover a nature preserve they haven't visited, an event they'd like to attend, or a local conservation organization they didn't know was working in their own backyard to conserve places for the community to enjoy.

By the end of the day, our empty totes told the story pretty well.

Thank you to Indiana State University for another fantastic Indiana Bat Festival, to everyone who stopped by to say hello, and to the OLC volunteers who spent the day connecting people with conservation.

And next year? We'll bring more brochures.