Stemming from a life-long love of animals, Dianne Odegard took on the role of a wildlife rehabilitator back in the early 1990’s while working for the Texas legislature. Dianne started this work by helping raccoons because there were so many around the Texas capital.

“I had a house full of raccoons and a backyard full of raccoon cages. It was great and I knew then that it was my mission to be a wildlife rehabilitator” said Dianne with a big smile.

Shortly after retiring from her government job she went to work for Bat Conservation International (BCI), a non-governmental organization started by biologist Merlin Tuttle, to conserve bats and their habitats through conservation, education, and research efforts.

Dianne said she “took the job at BCI because I'd always enjoyed everything about bats. I think this was because I was always attracted to the underdog animals. The ones that others were afraid of, or people thought were not worthy of our time and attention.”

Soon after this experience, Lee Mackenzie and Dianne Odegard co-founded the Austin Bat Refuge, a Texas based non-profit that rehabilitates bats and educates the public about their importance to the environment.

She said that seeing them up close and working with them made her “absolutely fall in love with them and so did Lee. He was part of all of this and has been incredibly supportive and literally the backbone of this organization.”

Because bats are nocturnal, live in dark spaces and caves and are little understood by the general public, people often react with fear and even demonize bats. The work of the Austin Bat Refuge is about portraying the reality of these fascinating and vital creatures. “Bats are incredibly important for the benefits they give us, but they also have huge intrinsic value.  They are the unique product of millions of years of evolution” says Lee.

And in Austin, bats are a big attraction.

In the 1980’s, the renovation on Austin’s Congress Street Bridge over Lady Bird Lake added expansion joints which it turns out is perfect for the Mexican freetail bats. “The concrete soaks up the heat during the day and keeps it warm at night which is perfect for these bats, which have just one pup a year. The concrete keeps the pup warm at night while the mother goes off to forage for food. It’s a solar powered incubator” stated Dianne.

Every evening from March until October, clouds of bats fly out from under the bridge, making the site one of the world’s top attractions for bat lovers. Lee and Dianne are there to answer questions and share the wonder and mystery of bats with visitors.

The Texas Hill Country around Austin is ideal for bats. Limestone is everywhere and it dissolves easily in the rain, creating thousands of caves. There are hundreds of “maternity domes” for the millions and millions of bats that breed around Austin. “We're in the bat capital of North America” says Dianne, “and Austinites love their bat colonies. They know about them and they embrace them.”


However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a great deal of uninformed theories about bats which makes Lee’s and Dianne’s mission a lot harder to help the public understand how important bats are to the rest of us.

“Bats are getting a lot of bad press” says Dianne, noting there have been some indiscriminate killings of bats worldwide since the pandemic. “Bats did not cause Covid-19, nor do they spread the disease. Habitat destruction, wildlife trafficking, and industrial livestock farming have played an important role in past outbreaks.”

Bats are unique among the world’s creatures. On the planet for 50 million years, the only mammals capable of true flight, bats make up one-quarter of all mammal species and can live for decades. Bats are also essential to ecosystems. As the primary predator of night-flying insects they control crop pests and insect-borne diseases. They pollinate trees and crops, and through seed-dispersal, contribute to the renewal of forests.

Since about 2011, some farmers in Texas use natural techniques including bats, and are “saving over a million dollars a year – money that isn't spent on pesticides.” Dianne goes further to say that “without these pesticides in the environment, in the groundwater, in the crops we eat, all of this has a positive and far-reaching effects on humans.“

Lee and Dianne are dedicated to educating people on how to live in harmony with bats, especially those in urban areas near man-made structures. The Refuge protects and rehabilitates orphan bats and gets them back out into the wild. “We also do conflict resolution” says Dianne. “We talk to people who may have bats living in an attic, a loft or in the siding of a house. They’ve adapted very well as their own habitat is being lost.”

“We have always had a lot of support for what we do from the public and our friends in the scientific community” adds Dianne. “Bats are absolutely not dangerous, as long as we simply give them space.” Both Lee and Dianne emphasize that people are not at risk for getting Covid-19 from a bat. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering and sensationalism now that we want to tamp down” Lee says.

For Dianne and Lee their work as bat rehabilitators is a labour of love and they have attracted the interest of biologists from all over the world. “We have a steady stream of graduate students volunteering time to work with us at the Refuge. We also attend conferences on bats and even have African biologists come talk to us about fruit bats and other species native to the African continent” Dianne happily recalled.

However, all of this work is paid out of their own money or through donations which means the mean Dianne and Lee have no time for holidays. “As we get older, and we are getting close to our late sixties, we worry about ‘who will do this work when we just can’t keep up this busy schedule’.” It would seem that the potential bats hold for agriculture, and tourism, could attract more attention and financial support but marketing a business is not their objective.

“I think a sense of wonder is one of the most important things when you work with animals” says Dianne. “We learn new things every day. We are learning from other rehabilitators, we are learning from our veterinarians and they learn from us. This is about conservation. This is not going away. I never feel I don’t want to be doing this.”

“Bats are not out to get us” adds Lee. “They are just doing what they have always been doing here in Central Texas for millions of years. Peaceful coexistence is what it’s all about. Bats pose no risk to us and their benefits far outweigh any perceived risk people are talking about nowadays.”