If you like good food, good music, good company, and great local art, mark your calendar for the evening of Oct. 19. That’s when the scientists of Kwiaht will mount a special dinner at The Love Dog Café to mark the 2012 International Year of the Bat, celebrate our local bats, and raise money for bat conservation in the San Juan Islands.

Tickets for this unique limited-seating event are for sale at Vortex and The Love Dog Café for $50 and include a complete tapas-style dinner, music by Hawk Arps, and an audio-visual presentation by Kwiaht Director Russel Barsh on listening to bats.

Kwiaht and The Love Dog Café also invite guests to enjoy a no-host bar featuring Lopez Island Vineyards wines by the bottle, and to buy something “batty” to take home with them. There will be wearable bat art, the latest in bat detectors, books on northwest bats, Kwiaht’s own first-release CDs of Lopez bats in concert, bat art by Polly Ham, and bat field trips in spring with Kwiaht scientists.

All proceeds of the event go to support bat colony monitoring (including diet and health checks), maintenance of buildings used by bats, construction of Kwiaht’s original large bat maternity houses for relocating bats and technical assistance to homeowners. A special fund will also be established to donate bat detectors to local schools, and to island libraries for overnight lending. Internet-streamed “bat cams” to monitor rare bats are also included in Kwiaht’s $5,000 fundraising goal for bat projects in 2013.

“Bats are incredibly cool,” said Barsh. “But they are declining throughout the United States, and there was no program to document and protect island bats until we got involved two years ago.”

Kwiaht scientists have investigated dozens of reports of bat colonies, and designed and built eight large maternity colony houses with room for hundreds of bats. Local donations and volunteers provided the materials and labor.

Most island bats find the warmth and safety they desire in the roofs and walls of homes, barns, and sheds where they may not be welcome. Building warm, dry and safe separate housing for bats makes it easier to support and enjoy them.

“Preserving colonies in spacious attics and hay lofts is ideal, just like a big cave,” said Barsh. “But very few places are built that way any longer.”

He adds that the benefits of bats in controlling mosquitoes, cutworm and tent caterpillar moths, and other pests far outweigh the very small risks to humans from bat-borne diseases in the islands.