My daddy is Bat-man

3 August 2009 by Crystal 1 Comment

Towhead is not a normal kid. How could she be with parents such as us? She is bombarded with useless details about politics and local wildlife, cooking and physical science. Yet she is so much a stereotypical three and a half year old that, if asked what her favorite animal is she’ll respond with a fervent, “Snakes! But only pink ones.”

Sometimes I try to put myself in her shoes . . . a restrictive and dangerous proposition. But I do wonder what it would be like, as a kid, to have mom respond to the question “Where’s daddy?” with “Playing with bats,” “Chasing birds,” or “Getting a deer out of someone’s basement.” And I imagine I would respond the same way she does. “Can I see?”

I think bats are fascinating. First of all there’s echolocation – how cool is naturally-developed sonar! They eat insane amounts of night-flying insects like moths, beetles, mosquitoes, termites, and flies – also very cool.

Spokane County Parks and Rec does an annual class on Bats of the Inland Northwest. It involves a 20-minute lecture on bats and bat ecology followed by a trip down into a canyon where biologists from BLM (Bureau of Land Mgmt) and WDFW (WA Dept of Fish and Wildlife) capture bats in mist nets and harp traps, and then bring them down the canyon where people from the class can watch them being processed (ie mesured, weighed, etc) and released. Mr. A helped out last year, after getting his rabies vaccine of course. (I teased him no end about getting rabies shots. How can you resist an opportunity like that?)

Mr. A was asked to help again this year, so when the opportunity came up for me and Towhead to register for the class and check it out Mr. A and I figured  Towhead is old enough to stay up that late and has shown some interest in bats, so why not?

First came the 20-minute “class” on bat ecology. What I got out of it:

• Bats are the only flying mammal.
• They make up 25% of the mammalian species on earth. With ~4260 species of mammals of earth this means that in the mammalian version of the United Nations (United Mammals?) we get 1 vote, bats get 1065.
• Some bats can live up to 30 years.
• A very small percentage of bats are infected with rabies but there are still certain safety precautions you should take, and certain behaviors to watch for to identify a bat that is infected (see this handout for details).
• Bats often capture insects when flying by scooping them into their tail or wing membranes, and then putting the insects into their mouth. This results in the erratic flight most people are familiar with when they watch bats feeding in the evening.
• Large quantities of bats on the east coast are being wiped out by White-nosed syndrome, a fungus that infects winter hibernacula (an area where bats hibernate) and kills entire colonies.

What Towhead got out of it:

• Bats do neat things and are not as scary as they look.

The next three hours involved watching a biologist from BLM handle bats right under our noses.