After I bought Owl Acres, I loved to come out to the country and enjoy the soundscape, barbecue over a fire in an old washing machine tub we found in the fence row, and think about the house I would build.
On one of those beautiful summer evenings I invited the kids to come out and join me for a washtub barbecue.
As the afternoon slid into early evening, we suddenly witnessed an exodus from the woods. An army of bats was heading out to find their supper. I was excited to know that there would be help coping with the mosquitoes, as bats are voracious mosquito-eaters.
That hasn’t always been the perception of bats in my world, however. One of my earliest memories regarding bats was one winter evening in the girls’ dorm at the Iowa Braille School where I was a student. A bat found the fireplace chimney and came swooping out of the fireplace. It began looping and swooping around the lounge, no doubt looking for a way out. Everyone freaked. My housemother, a woman of considerable years, (it seemed to me at the time,) went crazy as the bat continued its loop-de-loops around the room. She screeched us girls to our bedrooms to protect us from the bat, and then went after it with a broom. I don’t think she ever actually got the bat. I think it escaped outside. But at the age of eight, I was taught that bats are frightening, dangerous, and just plain terrible. This experience was reinforced by my mother’s oft-repeated warning that if a bat bit me, it would give me rabies. Bats were to be feared, avoided, killed, and maligned. They were, of course, also spooky, creepy symbols for Halloween.
Their role in Halloween probably dates back to the Celts. They believed that once each year, the ghosts of their ancestors returned to earth to cause mischief and mayhem. To protect themselves against these spirits, the Celts dressed up in costumes and danced around roaring bonfires, burning offerings of crops and animals to appease their ancestors. Some speculate that the heat and light from the bonfires drew moths and the moths enticed bats to the feast. Seeing these bats circling and swooping around the periphery of the party could give you the willies, especially if you thought they were great uncle Harry come to harass you for giving his favorite coat to the Salvation Army. Or maybe they’re part of Halloween just because they’re spooky. Anything that goes whiz in the night creates all kinds of stories of demons, vampires, and, circling back—bats. It seems to be a universal response to them as these legends abound worldwide.
Over the years, I have become fascinated by the little creatures that can fly so precisely using their hearing. Wouldn’t it be marvelous, I have often thought, to be able to navigate by sonar so accurately? And, for that matter, wouldn’t it be marvelous to fly!
Blind as a bat is such a common phrase that we don’t realize that bats are not blind at all. They have small eyes particularly adapted to the dark. They use their vision in conjunction with their hearing and echo-location techniques to avoid predators and locate prey. They can fly 20 miles an hour when they’re hot on the trail of a juicy morsel.
One of these little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) weighs only about half an ounce but has a wingspan of eight to eleven inches and body length of from 2.5 to 4 inches. They eat at least half their weight each day in insects. Lactating females might eat their entire body weight plus in insects. Their fur color ranges from brown to red, and their wings are little arms with very long fingerbones with skin stretched between them to form the flying surface. They hang upside down from their hind legs when they’re roosting, and spend their days in torpor and their nights in hunting and banqueting on insects including midges and mosquitoes. During the winter they hibernate in large colonies in places like caves or the attic or barn. Male bats will copulate with anything that looks like a bat, whether it’s male or female, or whether it’s awake and engaged, or hanging upside-down in hibernating torpor. How rude!
I considered putting bat houses up in the woods to encourage them to stick around and eat my mosquitoes. And then we discovered that the 1915-era barn on the property is providing a giant bat house nursery for little brown bats. No need to construct one.
We discovered them when one of the adults considered humans as intruders and started flying about to warn us away from their roost. The little colony had about ten bats in it, including a mix of adults and juveniles. Since each female only bears an average of one kit per year, (sometimes two), these were likely mother bats and this year’s offspring. Mothers would be teaching the young ones to hunt, and those charming father bats would be off flitting about free as a—bat.
Bats have three different kinds of roosts. One is for daytime torpor. One is for nighttime congregating, and the third is for communal hibernation. They’ll migrate some hundreds of miles to the hibernation site (which is also where they breed.) Then they’ll come back year after year to raise the young. A bat’s average life span is six to seven years in the wild.
Although rabies is very rare in bats, other things like tapeworms, fleas and bedbugs are often carried by them. Bats and birds can also carry histoplasmosis, via fungal spores in their droppings which are released into the air during cleanup or construction. Histoplasmosis can be very severe in humans, so care should always be taken in cleaning up after bats were roosting in the attic.
The bat population worldwide is decreasing, largely due to loss of habitat and reduction in the biomass of insects. (In some places insect biomass has decreased by a whopping 75%!) We’ll keep supporting the bats as best we can here at Owl Acres. I’m happy to give them all the mosquitoes, but I would prefer that they stay out of the chimney.
Photo by Author
2 comments
I really enjoyed the story about your bats. Love your sense of humor.