Fly by Night : Bats May Not Be as Cuddly as Koala Bears, But They Need Love Too

LIKE MOST OF us, Ed Mitchell sometimes feels overwhelmed by appeals for money to save this or that endangered creature from extinction. He thinks the ultimate, though, is an appeal on behalf of bats.

Mitchell says an ad placed in the New Yorker by Bat Conservation International of Austin, Tex., restored his “sense of despair.”

“After seeing pitches from countless altruistic organizations, I thought I’d seen just about everything. But (this ad) caught me with my sophistication down.”

He adds: “I wish I could say my check is in the mail to help conserve bats; but I haven’t even sent in a contribution to the Save Angels Flight Fund yet.”

I am not surprised that some kind group has come to the aid of bats. If any order of mammals needed help, it is certainly bats. Not only are they, in general, a ferocious-looking lot, but they have been much maligned in fiction and myth. Bats inspire universal repulsion.

But we must not tar all bats with one brush. There are about 900 species, more than in any other order of mammals except rodents. They range in size from the Philippine bamboo bat, which weighs only 1/20th of an ounce, to the flying fox, which may weigh more than 2 pounds and has a wingspread the size of a ceiling fan.

The bat is a marvel of evolutionary adaptation. It not only flies, with a membrane attached to its front and back feet, but can also avoid objects in the dark. It does so by echolocation, a sonar system by which the bat sends out squeaks that bounce off obstacles. The bat’s sensitive ears measure the returning sound for the object’s position and distance.

I have seen this phenomenon at work. In my youth I used to explore old mining shafts in the Randsburg district. Sometimes my intrusion disturbed clans of bats that were hanging upside down in the dark caves.

They would fly about in evident panic, but the panic was mine, not theirs. Some flew crazily out into the daylight, which, according to legend, they hate; but some merely returned to their perches. None ever touched me, much to my relief.

They may exist, but I have never seen a stuffed nylon bat. To children, bats may not be as cuddly and lovable as koala bears. Perhaps manufacturers do not regard them as salable. Many species have rodent faces with crinkled-up noses, rat-like ears and fiercely gleaming eyes.

It is not so much their hideous faces and winged bodies that have caused us to ostracize bats, but rather the ancient myths in which dead humans, such as Count Dracula, leave their graves at night in the form of bats to suck blood from human victims, especially fragile young women. As we know from the movies based on Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel, these vampires must return to their graves or caskets before daylight. Endangered young women can frustrate vampires by sleeping with a string of garlic around their necks, or the villain can by killed by driving a stake through his heart.

There are actually three species of bloodsucking bats. They are called vampire bats after the ancient legends, and their tactics are indeed frightful. Like Count Dracula, they feed at night. They make a small cut in their sleeping victim with sharp incisor teeth, usually not even awakening their prey. Then they suck the blood that sustains them.

Should that discourage children from wanting them as pets?

As Mitchell notes from the New Yorker ad, bats are clean and intelligent, and they serve nature by pollinating flowers, spreading seed and destroying crop-damaging insects.

“BCI claims,” he says, “that without bats a host of insect pests would multiply unchecked, many of our planet’s most valuable plants would go unpollinated, and 95% of the seed dispersal in tropical rain forests would be left untended, thus doing in the ecological balance. . . .”

Visions of Dracula notwithstanding, it is clear that the bat is our friend, and that, despite its appearance, it is here to serve humanity.

I’d be the first to buy a stuffed nylon bat. Children’s hearts are big, and bats need love, too.