The bats have run as a thread through my life ever since that first childhood encounter. Summer nights, whether camping trips in the woods, or picnics at the homes of country friends, bring natural nightlife out: the calls of crickets, katydids, frogs; the moths circling round and round the lamps; and if one troubles to look upward, there are the bats, black sillhouettes darting and swooping overhead. Among the birds, only swifts and swallows fly quite like that -- and swifts and swallows are creatures of the day. I always feel something is missing, if I look skyward on a sultry evening and see no bats, dark against the sky.
As childhood became youth, and youth maturity, I never ceased to love the sight of a bat winging through the night. I saw them in every region and climate; but I could never identify them. The field guides show colors, details of faces, relative sizes. This worked for that first bat, found dead, but the living bat generally looks like a solid black outline, a fast-moving shadow whose size and shape is difficult to judge. To identify a bat, one must somehow get it to hold still up close.
I had a chance to see this mist netting in Costa Rica. As part of a university course in tropical biology, we had a guest lecturer, a bat biologist. After the lecture -- in which we saw some beautiful slides of Neotropical bats -- we went down to the village, where a narrow vehicle track penetrated a patch of remnant cloud forest. There, our guest set up some mist nets, of the same kind used by ornithologists, and we all stood by, waiting. It was not long before the bats arrived, and the biologist set about the long, delicate task of untangling them. It was crucial not to break the thin wing or leg bones, for a bat thus crippled would almost surely die. As he worked, he would tell us each bat's species. At his side stood one of the students, an entomologist; each time a parasitic bat bug appeared in the bat's fur, this student would deftly pick it off with his tweezers and place it in his collecting vial. Bat bugs are found nowhere else but on bats, passed from mother to young in the nursery roost. Once a bat was extricated, it would be placed into one of the cloth bags at the biologist's waist. Our professor's six-year-old son was there, and commented on the bags' pattern: they were of orange fabric with a black bat print, and looked like bags for Hallowe'en candy. "Why do the bags have bats on them?" the boy asked. "They're bat bags," replied the scientist.
We got mostly fruit bats and nectar bats that night -- although to me they looked exactly like the insect-eating bats of northern climes. Further down the mountain, in the livestock lands, there would have been vampires; but we caught none here in the cloud forest, where flowers and fruits were by far more abundant. After all bats had been removed, we took down the nets. Then, one by one the bats were removed from the bat bags and set free, flying back into the darkness of the forest.
In another part of Costa Rica was my first daytime sighting of living bats. Santa Rosa National Park is a seasonally-dry, tropical deciduous forest, very different from the lush mountain cloud forests. As we ate lunch in a picnic area, I chanced to look up along a tree bole, and saw three bats roosting there, clinging to the bark. Another time, in Ecuador, I was deep in a second-growth thicket. A single bat hung from a shrub, asleep. I was so close that I could see enough of its features to identify it: hairy big-eared bat, Micronycteris hirsuta. Other times, I have come upon roosting bats inside derelict houses or while on a cave tour; these encounters are rare, and always memorable.
Another of my best memories is of bats in the city. Hsinchu, Taiwan is a typical high-density Asian city: multistory buildings jammed haphazardly against each other, with long, winding alleys between -- some wide enough for motor scooters, some so narrow that two people walking could barely squeeze past each other -- and shops and homes fronting the alleys as often as the streets; the streets crowded with cars, trucks, scooters, and pedestrians; glaring neon and fluorescent signs lighting the night high above the bustling streets; and small, gray-green parks the only relief from pavement and cement. Yet it seemed there were at least as many bats here as in the wild woods. I could walk through the old quarter after dark, and see them darting and swooping between the grim, gray buildings, the bright lights glaring off their fur to make them look ghostly pale; or, stand on the roof of my apartment building in that same old quarter at dusk, and watch the bats gradually appear and increase as the sky turned from blue to indigo. The bats of Hsinchu give me hope: even in what seem the bleakest situations, life somehow holds its own.
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