'Save-the-bats' campaign turns National Museum project upside

'Save-the-bats' campaign turns National Museum project upside down

By Sheri Prasso

PHNOM PENH (AFP): "Save the bats" is not an often-heard cry of the world's conservationists, who tend to promote the cuddly panda, colorful tiger and soulful whale for their cause.

But Cambodia has a bat colony termed so "unique and remarkable" by a recent study that it ranks among the most important in the world. From the rafters of Cambodia's treasured National Museum, housing ancient masterpieces from the golden age of Khmer civilization, hang the highest density of bats known to inhabit a man-made structure anywhere.

More than four rare species live among the 1.5 million to two million bats, who by day cling in bunches from the museum roof like broken umbrellas and by night swarm the skies around the neighboring Royal Palace like macabre creatures from a freaky Alfred Hitchcock film. They include a new species never seen before, recently dubbed the Cambodian Free-Tailed Bat.

The problem is, they defecate on the sandstone sculptures.

And the acid in their excrement is wearing away the delicate features of Cambodia's most-precious national treasures, as well as electrical wires whose worn states cause the lights to flicker and leave the museum vulnerable to fire.

"It has been a bizarre saga," Australian Ambassador John Holloway, whose country volunteered to replace the museum roof and suspended ceiling, said in an interview. "The bats have been an obvious complication in what they do to the ceiling."

The ceiling is in danger of collapse due to accumulated bat guano, and its cracks allow a constant rain of fine, putrid excrement particles that penetrate the nostrils and rest on the tongues of visitors attempting to view the great Khmer works.

Enough

Falling lice from the creatures above ruined the visit last year of a Thai princess, who began scratching uncomfortably while being escorted through the galleries. That's when the Cambodian museum curators decided enough was enough.

But a study undertaken by an Australian government-funded conservationist determined the rarity and importance of the colony and urged its preservation.

Now it will take an estimated US$1 million -- raised by an appeal to business leaders by Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans -- to replace the roof and suspended ceiling, line it with plastic and cover it with removable trays that allow the regular collection of guano.

There is financial incentive to clean them. A basket full of bat manure, good for growing onions, sells in the market for 5,000 riel ($2). Profits from bat manure were what kept the museum operating under the previously communist government, which inherited the bats from the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975-79, when the winged creatures found in city buildings refuge from sling- shot-armed villagers starving in the countryside.

But plastic and trays won't solve all the problems, according to one museum official.

"Cats and birds eat them and leave carcasses all over, and during the dry season a lot of them die of the heat and fall all over the place. If we don't collect the dead ones every day, they decay and it smells even worse in here," the official said.

Cambodians seem convinced by the need to keep the bats in the city rather than chasing out to countryside palm trees where they belong, some for conservation-conscious reasons, and others for gastronomic ones.

"They're very tasty," said a police officer stationed near the National Museum whose comrades occasionally trap them in mosquito nets when they want a quick snack at night.

"Fried in oil is the best. Sometimes we make a barbecue also, but it takes longer to cook them," he said.

Aficionados says bats taste like pigeon.

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