Let Us Now Praise Bats

Bats possess super-powers. Alone of all mammals, they fly on their own; they emit high-pitched sounds through specially-convoluted nostrils and from the echoes locate with deadly precision erratically-moving targets such as moths; to viruses, they possess immunity that scientists are now trying to understand. And they sleep upside down!

[Information and the photo of the handsome upside-down bat come from "The Virus, the Bats, and Us" by David Quammen in The New York Times, December 11, 2020.]

Bats live as long as 30 years.

Bats spread pollin and seeds necessary to the life-cycle of vegetation from which we derive nourishment, including many fruit trees.   They eat hordes of crop-destroying insects.

A bat of some sort makes one of every five species of mammal on earth.

Bats are accessories to the spooky stories that both frighten and delight children. See in my photo collage two of the batmen I adored in primary school, Adam West as "Batman" and Al Lewis as "Grampa Munster." Another batman, Dracula, is pictured in my appreciation of bat-mospheric art that I posted on Halloween 2017:

This time of year, when our first cold days hammer shut the coffin of summer, before we experience sunlight sparkling on the frost of winter, it's natural to sense what the ancient Celts called a "thinning" between our world and the world of our fears, embodied by those scary monsters.

Bring on the bats, the howling wind, the branches scraping the window, and the ghosts of decades past. (10/2017)

Bats need our help. North America's bats are being wiped out by "white nose disease" caused by a fungus imported from Europe by some tourist spelunker. Immune to rabies and other viruses, bats don't spread them; our species has to invade theirs to catch anything from them. Yet some media figures blame Chinese bats for COVID-19, some misguided communities in the world go on periodic genocidal rampages, and my own neighborhood chat board re-circulates falsities about the little creatures.

The Bible mentions bats only one time. Bats are listed with birds in a list that includes eagles, gulls, and pelicans, all branded with the word "abomination" (Leviticus 11.19). But "abomination" here specifically means "not to be eaten." So I like to think of this as a stricture for the mutual good of Israelites and bats, two of God's chosen species.

Let us cherish -- at a respectful distance -- bats.