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Bats
My husband and I were in our backyard, enjoying a clear, rural Minnesota summer night ten years ago when I asked, “Honey, what are these birds that fly at night?” He looked down at his feet and mumbled, “Thr rnt brds.” Gazing at the aerial ballet, I said, “I couldn’t understand you, dear; what kind of birds did you say?”
“They aren’t birds, they’re bats,” he said gently, in the tone of a man
delivering bad news. I fled inside in terror. A few A neighbor at that time told me that my state’s Department of Natural Resources frowned on killing bats. Would that mean that I couldn’t throw a pillow at one circling above my bed? I couldn’t whack one with a tennis racket if it dove at me? Wouldn’t that be self-defense? So I did the honorable thing: I studied them. Bats are mammals that may live for 30 years. And like Midwestern human mammals, tradition is important in the bat world. We didn’t realize that our 1915 Arts & Crafts style home had been the Plaza Hotel to many generations of bats. And they thought that WE were the pests. It took an entire new roof to convince them to live elsewhere. Where elsewhere? Ooops. They moved to the house next door. When those neighbors got a new roof, too, our bats found lodging in another neighborhood. Except for an occasional sonar-impaired flapper, I was done with screaming and fleeing. Bats were gone from my world. Or so I thought. Bats entered mainstream culture. Bats are in books. Storybooks! Picture books! Stellaluna is a 1993 award-winning, beautifully illustrated children’s book about--you guessed it—a baby bat that gets separated from her mother before she can fly and ends up in a robin’s nest. The book, by Janell Cannon, is lovely. End of story? No, my family thought it was very funny to buy me a life-sized Stellaluna toy as a gift. Apparently the memory of me screaming in terror was funny to them. Bats are on the Internet. Photos! Articles! You can take a quiz on bats from the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California at Berkeley at www.lhs.berkeley.edu/BATQUIZ Or try the Seaworld site at www.seaworld.org for FUN FACTS about bats in their Animal Bytes section Or find out how to get rid of them at http://www.batcon.org/discover/unguest.html. The latter doesn’t list pillows or tennis rackets among the eradication methods, by the way. Bats are in the media. Newspapers! Television! The Christian Science Monitor, in a March 1999 article, noted that bats are “misunderstood” animals. A recent episode of the television sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” centered on an antique chest that let loose a houseful of bats. My family laughed uproariously at the antics of the TV characters dealing with the flying animals. They repeated favorite parts of the episode to me. I laughed. But I didn’t laugh last week when I discovered a real, live bat flopping on the basement floor. It is not summer. I have a new roof. What was going on here? I bravely put a plastic flowerpot over the winged mammal (I learned that I can’t call it a rodent.) and courageously locked myself in my bedroom for the rest of the day. For the record, I only screamed aloud 1) when the phone rang, 2) when a door opened, 3) when the floor creaked, 4) when the radiator hissed, or 5) when the cat moved at all. Oh, yes I screamed one more time when my husband announced that my winged friend now flapped outside the house. But this time there was far less screaming and fleeing than in previous years. I’m making progress. So much progress that I encourage you to read Stellaluna, and the watch the re-run of the “Malcolm in the Middle” bat episode. Enjoy. Bats are here to stay. As long as they don’t stay at my house.
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weeks later I discovered
that a few of those bats came inside, too. At which point I fled outside in
terror. As a matter of fact, I did a lot of screaming and fleeing in terror for
quite a few years during warm weather.