Bat Shower
We sit bat vigil. Out on the grass at Tucker’s Grove in Santa Barbara. About thirty of us wait at dusk for them to emerge for their nightly forage. There’s a colony of Mexican Free-Tailed Bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) under a bridge spanning the creek. Bats like water. They don’t like moonlight.
We’ve come because the Los Padres Interpretive Association, a non-profit volunteer group that works with the Forest Service, has sponsored a public education program on bats. Other people are drifting out of the park. It’s the end of the day. We assemble on the grass in scattered groups of two, three, some sitting alone—middle-aged, kids, older folk. One man, clearly a serious bat watcher, sports a bat tee-shirt and looks through a pair of binoculars fitted with an infra-red device. The lenses have a spooky glow, making the man appear as though he has red-orange eyeballs on stalks. I’m here because I’m beguiled by the natural world and because of a rather excessive tendency toward outrage. Bats have gotten a bad rap and my propensity to ally with the underdog made me want to experience them for myself. Will I be freaked or charmed?
We’re facing south towards the bridge. We gaze at its underside, but in the settling dark can’t discern much more than creekside flora—bushes, sycamore and eucalyptus blurring into shadows.
It’s mid-June. The babies have only recently been born. Each female bears a single young. The infants roost in masses so thick they can exceed 500 per square foot. Primarily cave dwellers, bats roost in buildings or under bridges mainly during migration. From which cave, on which mountain, have they come? And where will they go?
We cock our ears. A lush sound, massive but muted, like hundreds of tweeting, chirping mice or baby birds, wafts up from under the bridge. I imagine a dense wall of bats the color of espresso, pulsating, about to explode off into the night.
The noise of traffic over the bridge, headlights flashing, irritates me. Don’t they know something extraordinary is about to happen? I want the cars to go away so I can hear them. Even the whispered conversations around me seem blaring. But these are city bats. Cars and street lights and barking dogs and people have become aspects of their natural habitat. If they’ve adapted, so can I. Seng-T’san, poet and Third Zen Patriarch, wrote, “....In this ‘Not-two’ nothing is separate, and nothing in the world is excluded.”
Colder and colder. I put my jacket on. Darker. It’s 7:40 p.m. Thirty minutes pass. I shift my body on the hard ground, trying to get comfortable. Binoculars at the ready. My Nikon 10x50 Stayflow Plus II is powerful but heavy. Its strap is starting to bite into my neck. My discomfort, like the fading light, intensifies the anticipation. A place for secrets and subterfuge, the dark has an edgy quiescence, a claustrophobic feel. It belongs less properly to human beings than to creatures with huge, haunting eyes and soundless footsteps.
Will they show? When? Forty-five minutes go by. I look up at the canopy of trees above my head. A breeze makes the leaves shimmy, now twirling silhouettes against an indigo sky. I turn again towards the bridge. Some Native American tribes view the bat as a symbol of rebirth. The Chinese consider it an omen of good luck and happiness. But in the West it’s reviled and misunderstood. The myths and legends of a culture maintain the strict boundaries that guarantee the integrity of its cosmology. The imputation of evil originates from the crossing of those boundaries, be they religious, class, sexual, racial, taxonomic. The bat is a mammal, but flies like a bird. It has wings, but fur instead of feathers. Transgression. Evil. Taboo.
We fear what we do not understand. Barry Lopez could as well have been referring to the bat when he described the wolf, another maligned creature, as “not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined.”
Bats do not attack people. They are not blind. Vampire bats (and they constitute just three of over 900 bat species) represent far less potential harm to the human body than Anne Rice does to literature. We rely on bats to pollinate fruit and nut trees, to disperse seeds that foster reforestation, and to control insects. A single bat can consume 600 insects in an hour. They love mosquitoes. If we pay attention, they can inform us about our own health. The vitality of their populations reflects pesticide and pollution levels in the environment.
Whoosh! Something springs out from under the bridge, flaps toward us, then zips over our heads and away. Was it a bat? Too dark to tell for sure. Flew too fast. Maybe just a—wait, there’s another—moth? No, there’re two more. Yes, bats.
All conversations stop. It’s 8:35 p.m. Another whizzes by. Seconds later, a trio. Then a stream of bats. It burgeons into a river. They sweep out from under the bridge, sparrow-size, flying erratically with sharp, angular turns like slightly stoned navigators, assured nonetheless, of their course. With a tailwind they can do sixty.
It’s like a star shower. They don’t shine, but they, too, are gifts of the night. Aggregate, relentlessly onward, evanescent. A bat shower. Hundreds and hundreds and magical hundreds more. They flutter straight towards us, reduced now in our wonder to absolutely silent witnesses.
They’re up and over our heads, as though acutely mindful of our presence, but with more consequential business on their minds. Survival. They register us briefly with their exquisite echolation as they glide off, heedless, finally, of anything but an inexorable purpose. I like the purity of their disregard, envy them their birthright community.
There’s something about critical mass that compels. A few bats tweak my attention, hundreds enrapture. The largest urban bat colony in the world, half a million strong, resides under a Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Texas. The sight must mesmerize one nearly into a coma.
The cocoon of darkness gives this spectacle an aura of intimacy. It’s like watching a birth. I almost feel like a voyeur, but can’t take my eyes off them. Airborne, the bats ground me, though I feel lighter. They humble me. My petty worries and selfish concerns seem trivial. I’ve forgotten about the cold and the traffic and the damp grass I’m sitting on. I wish the river in the sky would go on forever. But it stops as suddenly as it began. I look at my watch. The river has flowed for over five minutes. It felt like seconds.
I wonder how many other such events exist in this bountiful bioregion, ones of which I have no knowledge? I want to see them all, from the tiniest lichen sprouting in the canyons to the Blue Whales cruising the Channel. I have no doubt that if I learn deeply enough about nature, particularly in my own backyard, I’ll learn everything I need to know about life. I love my Macintosh and depend on my microwave and automobile, but technology makes me uneasy. I don’t want my reality virtual any more than I want my breakfast or friends or sex virtual. The further I move away from the natural world, the less in tune I become with my own soul.
Thank you, bats. For reminding me. And for your mystery and grace.
©Lucy Aron, Outrider Press 1999
