Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats
Bats used to give Mitchell “the willies.” Then a bat biologist turned up at his Vermont farm with a request to trap some bats, and in his first night netted two endangered Indiana bats. A few years later Mitchell retired from teaching and began to work his farm again, enrolling it in a forest-management plan specifically targeted to help the bats. By then, white-nose syndrome, a largely fatal disease of hibernating bats, had invaded Vermont, and anything to help the bats was getting government funding. So the 1960s countercultural Mitchell, who had initially bought his farm to live off the land and away from any government interference, discovered himself getting more and more enmeshed. The forestry plan to help bats began to dovetail with the requirement to remove the invasive buckthorn and garlic mustard that were appearing in his woods; so to reduce his taxes and improve the forests for the bats, Mitchell had to play by the government’s rules. --Nancy Bent