For one week each October, a classroom-style room on the second floor of Morrill Science Center II fills up with the one group of mammals most people only ever see as a blur at dusk. Bat Week at UMass Amherst runs Monday, October 26 through Friday, October 30, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, in Room 146 of the Morrill Science Center II at 627 North Pleasant Street. It is free, it requires no ticket, and it is built for walk-ins: the exhibit space is open to the public during the academic year on exactly those hours, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5.
The pitch from the UMass Natural History Collections is straightforward. From flying foxes to vampire bats, visitors learn about bat diversity and meet our local species. There is a contest: guess what is in the mystery jar, and you can win a bat of your own. And because the week ends on Halloween, Friday the 30th doubles as a costume day, with a prize for anyone who shows up in costume.
That last detail is the tell that this is not a generic science open house. Bat Week is timed to the calendar on purpose. The international Bat Week celebration falls in the last week of October, when bat organizations and agencies around the world push out events, urban bat walks, festivals, and classroom activities aimed at the same message: bats are pollinators, seed dispersers, and prodigious insect-eaters, and they face real threats. Bat Conservation International describes the week as an annual international celebration focused on spreading awareness and knowledge about bats, including the importance of conservation. The UMass exhibit is a small, local node of that much larger campaign, and it leans into the Halloween coincidence rather than fighting it. The university's own event listing for the 2025 edition put it plainly: celebrate one of Halloween's most famous mammals.
What makes the Amherst version worth a trip is the setting. The Natural History Collections are the university's research holdings, spanning plants, vertebrates, insects, other invertebrates, and anthropological primates, used by labs at UMass and around the world. The public-facing exhibit in Room 146 is a window onto that. The collections are not a museum with a ticket desk; they are a working academic resource that happens to keep a display space open to anyone who walks in during business hours. Vertebrate collections manager Kate Doyle is the contact for the exhibit and for access outside the academic calendar.
The bats on offer are not only exotic. The event promises both the showy extremes, the flying foxes and the vampire bats, and a meeting with local species, which in western Massachusetts means the animals that actually share the Pioneer Valley's nights. That local angle carries more weight than it might have a few decades ago. White-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that strikes bats during hibernation, has devastated cave-hibernating populations in the eastern United States; the National Park Service notes that little brown bats, northern long-eared bats, and tricolored bats declined by more than 90 percent across the eastern U.S. by 2018. Massachusetts wildlife officials have been working on bat habitat and white-nose issues for years. A free exhibit where the public can see local bats up close, and learn what they are up against, is doing quiet conservation work.
The mystery-jar contest is the kind of low-tech hook that gets people to stop and look. Guessing how many bats are in the jar, with a plush bat as the prize, turns a display case into a game, and it gives kids and adults a reason to linger in a room that otherwise reads as a research collection. The costume prize on Friday does the same thing for the holiday: show up as a bat, a vampire, or anything else with wings, and you leave with something.
Practical details are simple. The exhibit is at Morrill Science Center II, Room 146, 627 North Pleasant Street, Amherst. It runs 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, October 26 to 30, 2026. Admission is free and there is no registration. Questions go to Kate Doyle at [email protected]. If you want the costume prize, plan your visit for Friday, October 30, which is also Halloween itself.
One note for anyone reading the university's calendar entry: the listing's summary line shows a single date of October 30, but the event page itself gives the start as Monday, October 26, and the organizer's site describes the exhibit as running October 26 through 30. The costume day is Friday the 30th, not the whole run. Come any weekday that week for the bats; come Friday if you want the prize.