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Bad News For Bats
Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: 2021/07 – July
Luck may be running out for our diminutive nighttime neighbors.
If you’re like me, the long Covid scare brought me back to nature in a profound way.
I noticed, really noticed, the birds that surround my home and learned to recognize and truly appreciate their astonishing songs. I was startled to realize that these neighbors had individual personalities, and I devised strategies to allow them to begin to discern me as a discrete person rather than a human-shaped threat.
Tricia and I became close friends to a family of raccoons, and a lifeline to a wary possum that’d been bruised and battered by everyday existence.
And I’ve come to cherish a trio of Little Brown Bats that regularly perform entrechat and tour en l’air that’d cause the principals of Ballet Russe to weep in frustration and envy.
They’ve always been our nocturnal neighbors here in the shadowed mountains.
The Cherokee viewed the diminutive squeakers as bearers of good luck. According to their First Tales, an eagle, a hawk, and other birds shaped the first bat from a diminutive mouse-like creature. This little animal wished to participate in a ball game in which the beasts challenged the birds. Because they were four-footed, the mouse-like creatures first asked if they could play with the animals, which included a bear, a deer, and a turtle. But the larger animals made fun of how small the creature was and drove him away. He then appealed to the eagle, the captain of the bird team. The birds took pity on the little animal and fashioned wings for him out of the head of a drum made from a groundhog skin, creating the first bat. The birds won the ball game, with the agile bat scoring the winning goal.
But here’s the thing – it may be that luck is running out for bats here and around the world.
White-Nose Syndrome is a fungal disease that’s decimating our local bat populations and their neighbors across North America. When you add that threat to the supposed bat connections to the global Covid pandemic (none of which are true) it’s a bad time to be a bat.
If you’d like to help these little mosquito-gulpers, please support the mission of the Highlands Biological Foundation and the efforts of Bat Conservation International (batcon.org).
