Bat Week, October 25-31, is an annual celebration of the role of bats in nature. There are more than 1,400 species of bat worldwide. There are 17 species of bats in Virginia. I've always liked bats. I grew up in an old home that had bats in the attic. They would come out at dusk, chasing skeeters and anything else they could munch on. When I was a kid I used to toss sticks or baseball gloves or anything else up in the air just to watch the bat circle it as the bat chased the object to the ground and then flew off. The only downsides were the care you had to take when going in the attic after dark, and the occasional home invader. The upside was my sisters would get so jittery after such an event that something as benign as a paper airplane would elicit a disproportionate reaction. Most of the homes out here have utility poles at their houses (because we're so dispersed), and each pole has a street light on it. I used to love sitting on the porch and watching the bats swarm after all the bugs that the light attracted. (I've since had the light turned off to make the place more amenable to star gazing.) I've never seen this many, but it's an impressive sight nonetheless:
All I saw on the video was a pile of rocks, and not a single bat. I kept fast-forwarding to get to the part with the bats, but it was just music and rocks .
I replaced the video. There's a brief section in the middle that has the bats. It looks as though the sky was cropped out of the rest of it, or the video did not render properly. It's weird, the hover-over preview showed bats throughout the entire thing.
Bats are in trouble in this part of the country because of a fungal disease called White Nose Syndrome. During hibernation the disease causes them to awake too early when insect food is unavailable resulting in death. When we were kids playing at dusk I remember seeing them all over swooping after bugs but never hitting us. I also remember being able to see more stars than today, but that's a different story.
I'm right there with you. I fantasize about what those who preceded us must have seen when they looked skyward at night...it must have been fantastic. The Virginia link in my original post goes to our Dept of Natural Resources bat page. There's a section on white nose disease there.
I like bats. I've had 2 get inside the house in the last few years. Likely down the chimney and out the fireplace. Studied plans for making a bat house for them, but could find no good place to hang it. It has to be rather high off the ground, preferably not on a tree, and requires regular maintenance, or they won't use it, so I gave up on that project.
Dunno. I’m flipping a coin on this one. Bats are cool and they eat bugs that might be harmful to mankind ergo they are good for the ecosystem. Bats are not so cool because they carry a variety of virus’s including but not limited to coronavirus, some of which are easily transmitted to humans and other wildlife whilst other types of virus’s are Not transmittable to humans.....yet. Bats are cool because they are good pollinators. Bats are not so cool because they can destroy an entire crop of fruit. Bats are cool because their feces (guano) is a high grade fertilizer. Bats are not so cool because if one flys into the house and a person uses a broom to whisk the airborne varmint out of the house, a person might accidentally break grandma’s china cabinet glass doors thereby ticking off mama who just happens to be also called “wife”. Wife gets bats in her belfry and hubby sleeps on the couch for an unlimited amount of time.
My cat (Bird) brought a live one in the house one night, carrying it in through the cat door that we had on our fire escape window at that time. The bat was fine. I carried it out in a towel and it flew away and, most thankfully, Bird was not bitten, so everyone was fine. I don't know how she managed to catch a live bat, although it wasn't unusual for her to bring things in unharmed.
I remember when I was a kid on the farm, my grandpa had sacks of "gew-anner". It wasn't until I was grown that I knew the actual pronunciation of bat feces. (It seldom comes up in conversation these days.)
I sometimes refer to folks as "guano crazy," so it's still in common usage. I had no idea it was used on farms in the states, I honestly thought it was used in some regions of other countries out of convenience and lack of options.
Oh, I use "bat sh!t crazy" with wild abandon. I've even been accused of such, can you imagine?? I don't know if it's still used on farms, but it certainly was back when I was a kid. It was also used in the manufacture of gunpower and some eye makeup.... eww. ETA--I see from Google results that "bird excrement" is termed guano, so perhaps those products weren't specifically from bats.
In the novel that was the basis for the film, Dr. No was a guano salesman who was killed when James Bond buried him in a pile of it. http://archipelagobatguano.com/6.shtml
After your prior post, I did some reading about guano on WIKI. It had a lot of geopolitical implications in its day as an important resource. Bat and seagull crap both had value, but only if from regions where there were not high in rainfall and humidity (which leached its potency.) Wars were fought over guano. South American boundaries were changed as a result of such wars (Bolivia lost its coast to Chile.) The United States passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856, which enabled citizens of the United States to take possession--in the name of the United States--of unclaimed and uninhabited islands containing guano deposits. Guano cores have been pulled to research earlier environments, rainfall, pollen levels (for determining historical plant assemblage), and to even find evidence of earlier civilizations. We're talking going back to the Pleistocene era. Just like ice cores. I had no idea. Regarding our discovery of the broader sources of guano: The Guanay cormorant has historically been the most important producer of guano. I don't recall the exact phraseology, but I believe it was Socrates who referred to those people who are never satisfied with what they have in life as "cormorants...greedy, dirty birds who crap it out as fast at they take it in." I always loved that analogy. And now I see modern science acknowledging their role as being at the top of the guano chain.