Bats

Thanks to the nature of my job as an exploration field geologist, I have spent a lot of time underground. Again, because of the nature of my job, most of my time underground has been in abandoned mines, hoping to find a more extensive deposit that the old-timers either failed to recognize in their search for the high-grade, or left behind because it didn’t make their cut-off grade.

I’ve tied strings to the portal so I could find my way out; scaled wonky fifty-foot, hundred-year-old wooden ladders; waded through nipple-deep water; and routinely dodged what was usually a very robust population of bats hanging around in the abandoned workings.

The metals and the miners may be gone, but the bats remain. I honestly don’t think I’ve been in very many mines where I didn’t see a legitimate flock of fuzzy little mammals with wings, hanging from the ceiling (called the ‘back’ in mining lingo).

Ahhh… bats:

As vertebrates and mammals, bats are just like me and you. They are warm-blooded, give live birth to their young (they don’t lay eggs, like birds and many other species do), and nurse them. Bats need to eat, and breathe, and poop, and reproduce… again, just like we do.

Bats make up about 21% of all known mammalian species — out of approximately 6,400 mammals, roughly 1,400 of them are bats. This means that one in every five mammals on earth is a bat. After rodents (which make up about 40%), bats are the largest and most diverse group of mammals.

A baby bat is called a pup, and mothers nurse their young with milk. Mother bats hang upside down when they give birth — mom uses her tail membrane and/or wings as a safety net to catch the baby so it doesn’t drop to the ground and bonk its head. Most female bats have only one pup each year, though some can give birth to twins or triplets, or even fourplets.

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Bats get a bad rap, and there’s a whole lot of misinformation about them. Let’s start with the obvious one: bats are NOT blind, no matter how much legend and popular myth claim that they are. All bat species have functional eyes and can see quite well, often with great low-light and night vision. The common phrase “blind as a bat” is a complete myth, likely started because many bats hunt at night using sound and fly in zig-zag patterns, like a blind man weaving his way through a parking lot. Sure, they do use echolocation to help find dinner and keep from bumping into things, but they also have eyes, and their eyes work just fine.

The expression “bats in the belfry” is an old-fashioned idiom used to say that someone is eccentric, silly, or mentally unstable. The phrase is intended to compare the human head to a quiet tower where erratic, fluttering, and confused bats have taken up residence. This may or may not reflect kindly on the bat populations.

Not all bats are rabid and drink blood. Out of over 1,400 species, only three species in Latin America are vampire bats, and they feed on livestock or birds, not humans. Also, fewer than 1% of wild bats have rabies, although this doesn’t mean you should try to play tag with them (you’d surely lose anyway).

And no, vampires do not turn into bats when that’s a better choice than morphing into a werewolf.

Beyond all the fun times underground, our family has had quite bit of experience with bats anyway. We’ve lived in the woods — relatively deep in the woods in many cases — since the mid 1970s, and that’s where the bats live, too.

Probably our first serious experience, and the one that began Susie’s ongoing robust feelings about this most prolific of species, happened in the late 1970s. I was finally getting a break from looking for nickel in the red dirt and was just beginning exploration on some old chromite deposits from the WW II stockpile program (a project on which I am still involved nearly fifty years later). The deposits were remote, and I was often in the field for several days at a stretch.

We were also in the process of moving into a small cabin, completely off the grid, in the backs and beyonds of southwestern Oregon. Two of our three boys ended up being born in what we called the living room (converted twice into a birthing room for several hours), and all three were raised there until the mid-80s.

It was a very small cabin indeed, and one of improvements we made was adding a loft we could use as our bedroom. It too was on the smallish side, with only a foot or two of headroom (as lofts are wont to have). Because we were off the grid with no electricity, we enjoyed no climate modifications of any sort, and — since heat rises — it often was very warm up there. We’d sleep with all the windows open, even in the winter.

So, here’s Susie at 2:00 in the morning: I’m away looking for black rocks that streak chocolate-brown; the eldest toddler’s asleep downstairs; her infant son’s latched on and getting a middle-of-the-night snack; and here comes the bat through the newly-installed recycled window — dive-bombing her head and threatening to suck the juice out of the baby. Such began her lifelong animosity toward these creatures (and my emergency screening effort on the remodel when I got home a couple days later).

I have no doubt that if you had been in the same situation, you would still be concerned about having them anywhere close to you, too.

Anyway, we moved from that cabin and built a much larger place which actually is on the grid and has electricity… but it’s still in the woods and still has bats. We’ve learned to be careful with the doors in the evening and into the night, but sometimes the damn things find a way to get in, even with our most sincere attempts to keep them out.

It’s become an all-too-familiar scenario: a tiny winged beastie swooping around the house (their wings make a most distinctive sound); Susie — reliving past abuses — running into the bedroom and slamming the door; and me standing around on the main floor, trying to figure out what the hell to do next. The good news is that I’ve had a lot of practice.

In most cases, I can close all the upstairs doors and the door to the basement — the bedroom door has already turned into an functional barrier so I don’t have to worry about that one — and then open the sliders and hope the bat flies out of its own volition. My theory is that it doesn’t wanna be in the house any more than we want it here, and the good news is that in most cases — after a half-hour or so — it’s (usually) gone.

But the fear of bats must be instinctual (or possibly genetic). Re-position yourself in time to ten or so years ago, and our middle son’s three daughters were staying with us for a few nights (Obie had been the infant that had started this whole thing in the loft thirty-five years earlier, but we’ll choose to like him anyway). We’d been having such a pleasant time, and then here comes the eldest granddaughter, screaming down the stairs because a bat was in the room she was hoping to sleep in.

My carefully crafted response was something along the lines of “Say what?” She led me upstairs (Susie was already herding the younger two into the master bedroom) and pointed at the curtain in the guest room. Sure enough, there was a black splotch hanging on to the inside of the lace window covering. Yep, it was a bat! Needless to say, Bryn joined Susie and the other girls downstairs, huddled with them inside the bedroom and slammed the door for the second time in as many minutes, and left yours truly to deal with getting the bat downstairs and out of the house.

…and a good time was had by all.

Before I sign off, I leave you with this short video I picked up on a game camera:

Possibly a valuable lesson for all of us, don’t you think?