COEUR d'ALENE - Visitors who step into the North Idaho Wildlife Education Center in building 21 at the Kootenai County Fairgrounds will see the battiest exhibit around.

Coeur d'Alene artist Ken Jungjohann, 90, has created a 4-foot by 6-foot, L-shaped display exploring bats and their mysterious beauty. He sculpted 3-D bats from wire and clay, shaped a snag to showcase how standing dead trees can be used as habitats, and used acrylics to paint a large barn, with bats soaring from it at nighttime.

"I thought this is something the children might just want to touch and feel the bat," Jungjohann said.

Beth Paragamian, wildlife education specialist for Idaho Fish and Game and the Bureau of Land Management, is organizing the building and getting the exhibits ready for the North Idaho Fair and Rodeo. She said she thinks the 3-D bats are fabulous, in part because at first she was expecting just a 2-D display.

"I think they're very creative," she said. "He'll take an idea and make it even better than I imagined."

Jungjohann has contributed artwork to Fish and Game several times through about eight years, including educational wildlife posters that are given to families and interpretive signs at the BLM boat launch at Wolf Lodge Bay. He has broad artistic experience and even has public art in the Utility Box Beautification Project, with "Moose and Fly Fishing" painted on a utility box at the intersection of Government Way and Harrison Avenue.

"He's a great guy," Paragamian said. "He's very interesting and he keeps working."

Jungjohann, a World War II Navy veteran, graduated from the San Franciso Academy of Advertising Art in 1946. He has explored many forms of art media and is an airbrush specialist but tends to use realism to bring life to his work. The bat display took seven months to complete, a project he said was fun work. He conducted research to ensure they were realistic representations.

"They came alive," he said.

He said the project even earned him a nickname from one of his good friends.

"When I had finished the bats, he started calling me 'the Batman,'" he said with a soft chuckle.

The display also includes taxidermied bats to add to the realistic, 3-D effect. Paragamian said several different bat representations will be featured, including a mother bat carrying a baby bat and baby bats clustered together.

"They cluster together in what they call a 'maternity area,'" she said, adding that a mama bat can find her pup in a cluster because she knows its scent and the sound of its voice.

This is the first time the Wildlife Center has featured a walk-in "bat cave."

"It's really amazing," Paragamian said. "I see it almost every day and I still like to go in and look. The atmosphere that he created makes you feel like you're in a bat cave."

The Wildlife Education Center is home to other wildlife exhibits, including taxidermied bear, cougar, wolf, coyote, weasel, fish, birds of prey and songbirds.

Paragamian said also new this year is the outdoor wetlands area, featuring indigenous fauna found in marshy ecosystems. The exhibits will be available for viewing during the fair, Aug. 20-24, and will be available for viewing by appointment throughout the year.