Deep in a swamp in central Georgia, Matt Clement is calf-deep in oozy black water, crouching at the base of a massive water tupelo. In one hand, he holds a mirror. In the other, a million-candlewatt flashlight.

He's shining the light up the hollowed-out tree's "chimney," looking for a particular bat, a cute little fellow: a furry, half-ounce ball of gray with wings less than 4 inches wide, a tiny turned-up nose and ears so long it looks a bit like the Easter bunny.

MARCUS YAM / myam@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Matt Clement shows off a bat. On some, he attached a small transmitter.

MARCUS YAM / myam@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Three Rafinesque's big-eared bat (one hiding behind the first one) are spotted inside a water tupelo

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Until last summer, Rafinesque's big-eared bat was thought by scientists to be widespread across the South but still quite rare. In Georgia, just 70 individuals had ever been counted, mostly near the Florida border.

Clement's innovative research has changed that, confirming higher than expected population numbers. It also raise concerns that with the rapid disappearance of a bat's specific habitat — old-growth, standing-water bottomland forests — its fate is more precarious than previously imagined. For budding researcher Clement, his findings have also helped realize his place in the community of scientists.

While Christian Bale plays Hollywood's latest Batman this summer, the lanky and laconic Clement would be better played by Keanu Reeves.

"I was hoping to find maybe 30 big-ears," the 30-year-old University of Georgia graduate student says about his research project, which, after two summers, is just a couple of weeks away from completion.

Instead, working seven-day weeks and well after dark, when the bats wake for their breakfast, Clement — with a helper, Casey Carpenter, an undergrad research assistant — has surveyed eight swamps and tallied more than 900 Corynorhinus rafinesquiis.

'Humpty Dumpty' effect

As they approach the next tree on their route, tagged with a hot-pink ribbon, a venomous cottonmouth, a lethal three feet of snake, slithers off a rotting log and into water so dank it stirs no wake. Here one second, invisible but lurking the next.

It's like that everywhere in the wild, only more so in the swamp. A secretive bat. Almost no documentation. One of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Georgia species that live, and possibly disappear, without us knowing they are our neighbors.

"We had no idea how rare this bat was, or its habitat preferences, or what we were doing to it, or what needed to be done," said Jim Ozier, a program manager for Georgia's Non-game Conservation agency. "We've got a vast number of species and need to prioritize — not as a single-species approach, but as habitat protection."

Ozier contrasts Clement's nascent big-eared bat study with the intensive, decades-long investigation into the red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird on the precipice of extinction that thrives, just barely, in tracts of Georgia's long-leaf pine forest, sites now managed and mostly protected.

Clement's survey, he said, reinforces what conservation experts call the "Humpty Dumpty" effect.

"[It] fills a gap in the state wildlife management picture, where if you take down too many old-growth swamp trees, you can't get back that diversity and structure and habitat anytime soon, if ever."

'Bat boy' jokes

Clement and Carpenter, in khaki field pants and T-shirts soaked in bug repellent and sweat, trudge from tree to tree in the Beaverdam Wildlife Management Area, about a mile from the Oconee River, just upstream from Dublin.

At the north end of the Beaverdam area, jointly owned by the state and by timber companies, similar habitat is being logged.

The young scientists dislodge their high rubber boots from the muck, each step making a loud puckering sound and trailing the rotten-egg scent of methane — the healthy byproduct of mud bacteria. Although he's a real batman, his friends call Clement "bat boy," with the expected jokes about sleeping upside down. (Actually, for the summer, the pair sleep in a vacant, bare-bones park ranger log cabin.)

As a student in UGA's Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resource, Clement's focus has been more on the habitat than the biology of the bat itself.

"We actually spend most of our time counting and measuring trees," he notes, "and there's a lot of tedium. My friends say, 'I wanna come out with you and play with bats,' but I have to tell them that's not what I do."

To catalog the bat's preferred places to hang out, his tools are decidedly low-tech. A tape measure wrapped around the tree trunk for circumference. A small convex mirror, called a densiometer, to evaluate leaf canopy cover. And peanut butter and jelly for lunch, seven days a week.

When they find a water tupelo with roosting bats — in the hollowed-out chimneys that typically form in older, bigger trees — Carpenter starts wandering around in circles: He's counting all the other trees within a thousand square meters. GPS tracking pinpoints the location. (Clement's survey, costing about $100,000, is funded by the state and by the Warnell School.)

From swamps to Ivy?

He sometimes gets up close with his critters, handling them to attach a radio tracker, using medical glue to stick a Chicklet-sized transmitter between the animal's shoulder blades, so it doesn't inhibit flight. Otherwise the team spends 8- to 15-hour days and nights slogging from roost site to roost site, checking tree cavities for bats.

It's grungy work, but for Clement it's been a personal coming-of-age tale. "It's not really about the bats," he muses as his project approaches its end. "They're pretty cute, but I'm not sentimental about them."

He figures that with good grades and, hopefully, several scientific journal articles in the works, he'll land a spot in the Ivy Leagues for the rest of his grad school — away from forestry and into the more theory-based disciplines of evolution and ecology.

"What I loved was what drives almost all scientists, coming here and not knowing much about the bat's lives or habitats — and I figured it out and now I know."

A BAT'S BIO

Scientific name: Corynorhinus rafinesquiis

Common name: Rafinesque's big-eared bat

Sleeps in: Hollowed-out centers of water tupelo trees, which grow in standing water of bottomland swamps. (Where it hibernates in winter is unknown.)

Blind? Contrary to myth, bats can see pretty well, but they navigate and catch food (flying insects) by echolocation, emitting high-pitched sounds that bounce off an object, like a blind man tapping a white cane to judge the distance to a wall.

The drought: "[It's] been potentially devastating for the health of the swamps, but the low water levels have helped me work faster," says researcher Matt Clement. "It's much easier to walk in the mud than in the muddy waters. And I get nervous when there are alligators around."

— Pierre Ruhe