At the San Diego Natural History Museum, Drew Stokes would slide open a drawer to reveal dozens of bats—some the size of bottle caps, others like éclairs. They were not trophies. Most had died of natural causes and were donated to science. For him, they were data, clues, and—more than anything—creatures worthy of protection. He studied them without killing them, caught them without harming them, and spoke about them with the calm conviction of someone who had spent his career trying to make people see what they could not.
Bats, as he often pointed out, live in a world beyond human perception. Their navigation is sonic, their habits nocturnal, their anatomy strange. This mystery intrigued him as a child—his first “specimen” was a bat he found at recess and brought home in second grade—and it never let him go. He would later become the San Diego region’s preeminent bat expert, with more than two decades of fieldwork behind him. His surveys, echolocation analyses, and radio telemetry efforts documented 22 species in the county. He wrote every bat species account in the San Diego County Mammal Atlas.
Though Stokes also studied reptiles and amphibians, bats were his calling. Not just because of their elusiveness, but because of their ecological significance. As pollinators, seed dispersers, and voracious insect-eaters, bats perform vital services in ecosystems that rarely get noticed—until they fail. He worked quietly to prevent those failures, assessing roosts under bridges, advocating for construction schedules that would spare maternity colonies, and informing military land managers how to avoid harming bat habitats. Conservation, in his view, was not opposition to development. It was informed coexistence.
He had little interest in being the face of a cause. Still, he wore a bat tattoo on his forearm, gave talks at schools and national parks, and led nighttime walks where detectors translated bat calls into tones people could hear. If you listened closely, you might see the world differently. That was his hope.
His death from cancer came as a shock to the tight-knit network of biologists who shared long nights and longer hikes with him. He was known for patience, precision, and humor. In a field that often feels like a race against time, Drew Stokes never stopped looking—and listening—for what could still be saved.
