It was a perfect evening for a spin in the Batmobile with a team of three amateur chiroptologists. The air was warm and still when the sun went down.
After leaving the carpark, we were overtaken by every vehicle along the Colonial Parkway as we crawled at 15 mph, hugging the kerb. Fortunately, the traffic was light. It was too dark to see if the faces passing us were puzzled by the tall aerial sticking out of our sunroof or if they guessed what we were up to from the sticker on our trunk illuminated in their headlights: Bat Monitoring – Pass Safely.
Although I rarely hear bats nowadays, I love to watch their silhouettes against the last glow of a darkening sky. Their acrobatic flights look sheer joy, although I know they are to satisfy voracious appetites, twisting and turning to skim the air of mosquitoes, moths and lumbering beetles. After years of wondering what species lived here, I now had an opportunity to find out.
The passenger sitting beside the driver held the aerial with one hand and used the other to control the tracker pad of a laptop perched in front. I watched over her shoulder as she loaded the SonoBat software.
We hadn’t gone far along the tree-lined parkway when the computer chirped. It was our first hit. A chirogram on the screen (like a sonogram) showed regular pulses as a bat called for echolocation to detect prey and avoid obstacles. A machine-learning algorithm identified the species, saved data to a spreadsheet and could mark ambiguous results, if necessary. The passenger in the seat beside me backed up results by writing on a notepad. We had detected a Red bat, named for its red fur. It was impossible to see it or any others through impenetrable night.
This was my first time for a bat positively identified while flying free in the wild. Soon, there was another chirping, then another, often in a different tone and frequency. After two hours on the road we gathered 125 recordings, mostly ascertained. The total number of individuals was, however, unknown, and we probably had duplicates because bats of a given species have the same voice. But we were more confident that seven species flew close enough to detect that night, including the Big-eared, Big brown, and Silver bat. I never knew we had so many.
The software program identified calls by referencing a library of thousands of recordings of species from across the continent. We mostly detected Red bats, a common and widespread species. The Seminole bat has a similar chirogram, but being near the northern limit of its range it was unlikely to be mistaken for the closely related species.
When I joined the survey one night last year, bats were getting more attention from conservationists and there was growing public interest in their dwindling populations from loss of habitat to human development, Insectageddon threatening their food supply, and the toll from white-nose syndrome. They haven’t lost friends who always cared about them. But people who were indifferent before or harbored superstitions can find a better excuse for fearing them than the old myth that bats get caught in young girls’ hair.
Evidence is growing that the COVID-19 virus originated in bats before it infected humans, perhaps via an intermediate host. The species and country of origin are still unclear. Bats harbor coronaviruses to which they evolved enviable tolerance from long association and robust immunity. They have orthologs of our ACE-2 protein, a molecule with a physiologic role and widely distributed on our cells that offers the virus a gateway for infecting us by binding its spike protein.
To persecute bats as suspects of this or other zoonoses (certainly they can carry the rabies virus, like any other mammal) is no more justified than putting people in jail for spreading disease before they understood the menace or knew they were infected. Solutions to our problem lie not with the animal but in our connected world and with global travel.
Bats are fascinating creatures in the web of life. They cling to familiar habitats and if left alone they help us as insect-eaters and providers of pollination services.
When contact distancing is revoked after the pandemic, I hope to board the Batmobile again to watch pulses on the glowing screen that spark imagination about the peregrinations of bats outside in the night.
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