After a 43-day federal shutdown forced a one-year pause, the Bureau of Land Management’s Bat Beauty Contest returns October 24 with public voting on social media.
The Bureau of Land Management is again asking Americans to crown the best-looking bat on public land. Starting Saturday, October 24, the agency will post photos of wild competitors on its Facebook and Instagram accounts and let the public pick a winner, with the result due Saturday, October 31, during Bat Week.
Popular Science reports the contest was skipped in 2025 because of that lengthy government shutdown. Now it is back, complete with the agency’s promise of “plenty of batty puns.”
Every bat in the running comes from wild populations on BLM-managed land. Wildlife technicians take the photos. Voters do the rest.
In 2024, a hoary bat from Oregon named Hoary Potter took the title. The field also featured a long-eared myotis called Honey Bunches of MyOtis, a myotis tagged Robert Battinson, and two western small-footed bats, Batt Damon and Batlor Swift.
The names are the joke. The animals are not props. They live on federal range and forest ground the BLM already manages, and the contest is built to pull eyes toward Bat Week, which runs October 24 through 31.
Bat Week organizers note that one bat can eat up to its own body weight in insects in a single night. That is free pest control on a scale no spray program matches, and it is one reason the agency wants the public looking at these animals instead of recoiling from them.
Bats are easy to caricature. The record is less spooky than the costumes.
Only three bat species eat animal blood, and two of those focus on birds. There are more than 1,400 bat species on Earth. They account for almost 20 percent of all mammal species and turn up nearly everywhere, including deserts and polar regions.
Some do work people notice only when it shows up in a liquor cabinet. Each spring, female lesser long-nosed bats move from south-central Mexico into the southwestern United States along nectar corridors of columnar cacti and agave, the same agave used for tequila and mezcal, and pollinate as they go.
The serious threat is not folklore. In about 20 years, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats across North America and hit roughly half the species on the continent. Habitat loss and light pollution pile on. Rabies fears still outrun the actual risk for most people who never handle a bat.
A beauty contest will not reverse a disease. It can still put real faces, furry, odd, and named like a late-night pun reel, in front of taxpayers who own the land.
The mechanics are simple. BLM posts the contenders to its BLMNational Facebook page and the mypubliclands Instagram account. The public votes. The winner lands on October 31, when Bat Week ends and Halloween finishes the calendar cue.
No city stage. No studio lighting. Just field photos of animals already living on ground the federal government holds in the public name.
Last year’s shutdown wiped a light-touch outreach effort off the calendar for a full cycle. That is a small cost next to closed parks and stalled permits, but it is a cost all the same: even a harmless contest that builds goodwill for working landscapes got iced when the government went dark for 43 days.
Fat Bear Week has already shown that millions will watch wildlife when the pitch is straight and the animals are left wild. BLM is betting bat puns and a public ballot can do a smaller version of the same job.
Good. If federal land managers can keep the lights on long enough to post a few honest photos, voters can decide which bat looks sharpest, and remember which creatures actually earn their keep after dark.
