OLYMPIA, WA - Some jobs are spooky year round, not just at Halloween. This week, we're sending out correspondents to find the spookiest jobs in the Northwest. In part two of the series, how would you like to spend your nights with bats? But first, what do you think about sorting through radioactive garbage? As correspondent Anna King found, it's just another day on the job at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Imagine this employment ad in your local newspaper.

Phil Sheely: "OK. You're going to be exposed to chemicals, you're going to be exposed to radiation, you're going to have to wear respiratory equipment."

All for about $24 an hour, according to Phil Sheely, the guy who runs the radioactive trash operation at Hanford's T-Plant.

This is where Hanford workers chemically extracted plutonium for the two bombs dropped on Japan during WWII. Getting into the radioactive zone of the facility requires three full weeks of training. So, Sheely and his crew nicely mocked up a non-radioactive workspace for me to check out. And that was spooky enough. Think the movie ET when the scientists take over the house.

Jake King: "Do we have someone suiting up?"

SOUND: [Suit up]

Now these guys suit up in huge white jumpsuits. They duct tape their plastic gloves on. They transfer trash, oh like broken glass and bottles of acid, from a deteriorating drum to a new fresh-factory issued drum that's sealed off.

Jake King, no relation, says sometimes he's not sure what he's sorting through.

Jake King: "The thing that bothers me the most, I think are some of the acids and the bases."

Anna King: "What's wrong with the acids and the bases?"

Jake King: "It can burn a hole right through fairly quick, so that's my main concern when I got my hands in the bags."

King says having a job sorting through radioactive trash can get kind of lonely. When he explains what he does, say at a backyard picnic, people slink away. But he doesn't find it spooky at all.

Jake King: "There's a lot of doctors, lawyers and stuff like that, but I play with rad trash. It's cool."

SOUND: [Alfa detector clicking]

I'm Tom Banse on a farm at the edge of Olympia. The sun set about an hour ago. The temperature is getting chilly. Bat ecologist Greg Falxa turns on two bat detectors and soon they go off.

Sound: [silver haired bat flies over]

Greg Falxa: "That's our first bat."

The detector takes the silver haired bat's high frequency echo-location call and makes it audible to human ears.

Sound: [ping, ping]

Reporter: "Sounds like Hunt for Red October."

Greg Falxa: "Yeah. What it sounded like in real-time, I can flip the switch here. This is the actual cadence of it. Now I've reduced the frequency, but that's the cadence..."

Falxa works for the non-profit Cascadia Research and also sometimes The Nature Conservancy.

Greg Falxa: "I've been a nocturnal by nature. I grew up as a ham operator. I used to stay up late at night so I could talk to the other side of the earth on shortwave radio. My internal clock is kind of set to the bat schedule."

Sound: [bat detector picks up California Myotis bat hunting]

Falxa is unafraid even when bats fly right at him.

Greg Falxa: "That speeding up part was probably as they approached something, maybe the back our heads."

Greg Falxa: "...You ducked!" [laughter]

TB: "Couldn't resist the instinct to duck when it comes right at my head."

Greg Falxa: "We've all gotten to the point where we fight the instinct."

The precision acrobat flying loops over our heads is a tiny California myotis bat.

Greg Falxa: "Halloween is usually when they should be gone. And most of our bat species do disappear and go off and hibernate."

Falxa documented that Silver haired and California bats forage year-round in the Northwest, when the weather's not too crummy.

Greg Falxa: "In our culture it's associated with scary and vampires. But in China historically bats were associated with good luck on its way."

Copyright 2009 Northwest Public Radio and KUOW

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