Just Winging It

by Geoff Larcom

He has made Conan O’Brien recoil and take deep relaxation breaths, made a bat maven out of Martha Stewart and scared Jennifer Love Hewitt from her chair.

Eastern Michigan graduate Rob Mies (BS92), who entered EMU with the goal of becoming an environmental lawyer, has blossomed into a media star and large-crowd pleaser. He draws on his charm, his good looks and the resonant and surprising message that bats—one of the world’s most misunderstood creatures—are good for the environment and don’t harm people.

Any given month might see Mies doing presentations in Los Angeles or Denver or Holland, Mich. He speaks twice a year in New York City and appears at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, and his travels take him to remote locations like the Nicaraguan rainforest where he helps capture and document animals.

“My goal is to be inspiring,” Mies says. “What I want is to get people to go home and do something.”

Mies’s mantra: Bats are unique. They are the only mammals that can fly. They are important to our ecology and economy. They eat insects. They spread seeds. They pollinate.

But there are concerns that demand immediate action. Bat populations are dwindling due to environmental pressures, burgeoning wind power, and a new and deadly disease, white nose syndrome.

“There are lots of things we need to do,” Mies says of his effort to preserve bats and help them flourish. “That includes population monitoring. Where do they migrate? How, and when? There are lots of unanswered questions.”

“When Rob comes into the room, you can sense it,” says Bill Scullon, a wildlife biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and someone who’s often worked with Mies. “People tune in real quickly. You can see that energy, and the crowd feeds off it. It’s nice to see people so positive about conservation.”

Professor Allen Kurta, the nationally-known EMU bat expert who played a role in Mies’ own evolution, calls Mies highly personable, adding, “That’s a very important thing when you are running a conservation group. He does a very good job in public education.”

Mies never envisioned himself as a media star capable of holding an audience’s attention, let alone getting a crowd rippling with laughter.

“I never thought I was that type of person,” he says, sounding bemused at his fame. “I remember in my first couple of programs, I wrote stuff down on index cards. It was terrible. So I set the index cards down.”

He gradually grew comfortable simply winging it onstage, conveying startling facts about bats and outlining what is still unknown.

“That is what is cool about science,” he says. “We don’t know everything.”

Mies calls himself a “bat expert,” but he also could be labeled a wildlife ambassador, a conservation educator or a wildlife biologist. To that list you could also add the title non-profit entrepreneur; unlike many researchers or teachers, Mies has reached out over the last 21 years and formed partnerships with organizations and businesses such as Chrysler, DTE Energy and Waste Management.

“I could not originally find a job in bats,” Mies says. “But I made it. It was hard in the beginning, but I am extremely happy now. We’ve been through some difficult economic times, but I’ve formed a lot of partnerships. It saves money and it’s great brand recognition.”

A prime example of partnership is the Cranbrook Institute of Science, which houses the Organization for Bat Conservation (OBC), a non-profit dedicated to protecting bats and educating the public about them. Through OBC, Mies, his program staff and animal keepers present more than 1,500 programs yearly to nearly 250,000 people.

A building called The Bat Zone at Cranbrook houses some 200 animals, including owls, sloths and 12 different species of bats. Most of the animals have been hurt or disabled in some way and will remain in the staff ’s care. Mies has also participated in The Michigan Bat Working Group for 15 years, serving as chair for a dozen.

“He does all of that voluntarily,” Scullon says. “He’s the guy that keeps it going.”

The choice to attend EMU in the late 1980s came easily for Mies, who already had three older sisters at Eastern. Once he started, he noticed how regularly students could interact with faculty.

“You could just walk down the hall, and the door is open; it’s open access,” Mies says. “I remember playing racquetball with my professors and going canoeing with them.”

Mies entered school aiming to take pre-law courses and become an environmental lawyer; he emerged with a political science major and a focus on conservation and protecting nature.

“I got really lucky,” Mies says. “I got hooked up with graduate students studying bats with Professor Kurta. People weren’t doing that anywhere else. EMU was the best school to study bats.”

At Eastern, Mies met a graduate student of Kurta’s, Kim Williams, who later became his first wife. They met in Costa Rica during an EMU course in tropical ecology. They later founded the OBC together, with Williams eventually serving as co-director with Mies before leaving last year to pursue her interest in clinical psychology.

As the OBC grew, so did Mies’s fame, with his TV appearances producing a wealth of lively YouTube moments.

Among the funniest came on an Ellen DeGeneres Halloween show. Preceding Mies as a guest was actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, who expressed a fear of bats when Ellen noted who was coming up next.

Hewitt laughed nervously as Ellen talked, and you could sense her uneasiness. When Mies brought out his show stopper, a large Malayan Flying Fox with a wing span of some six feet, Hewitt climbed out of her chair and took a seat in the front row as the audience laughed.

After the show, she stopped Mies in the hall. “I’m so sorry,” she said, or words to that effect. “It was great to learn about that stuff.”

“That made it real,” Mies says of Hewitt’s anxious exit. “Bats do strike fear in people. I want to address that.”

The Malayan Flying Fox also kindled fear in Conan O’Brien, a city guy whose unscripted show format played to Mies’s improvisational style. Conan did a doubletake when Mies brought out the spectacular flying fox.

Mies has appeared on Martha Stewart’s show four times. One time Stewart, who apparently loves bats, became engrossed in getting a bat to pay attention to some fruit in a bowl, just as a producer warned it was time to move on to another segment.

“Listen,” Stewart said sternly. “I am trying to get this fruit bat to eat. “ Just another day out of the office for Mies. It’s been a fun journey, with plenty more turns in store.

His advice to recent graduates echoes his own experience. He wanted to pusue law but became one of the country’s most visible spokespersons for an under-loved, misunderstood creature.

“College is an amazing opportunity to learn things you don’t know and to try out things you never could,” Mies says. “But when I got out of college, there was no job I was interested in. Now, you could spend the rest of your life at a job you’re barely interested in, or just keep your eyes open and be willing to take a big jump.”