If you hate biting bugs, here's why you should be loving bats.
Thu, Jun 28 2012 at 5:49 PM EST
In a life filled with outdoor activities, I have only come upon bats up close and personal twice. Once was while I was spelunking a cave in Syracuse during college (he was hanging from the ceiling, as expected!) and once while I was in the Dominican Republic, when I found a tiny, adorable bat curled up asleep under a giant leaf.
But while I was standing in the northern part of Central Park a week ago, on a bat walk put together by the Audubon Society of NYC, I realized that bats had been all around me - I had just never noticed them. Bats, as you would suspect, come out at dusk, and because they way they fly is similar to birds, its easy to mistake them from their feathered fellow fliers. Indeed, the first bats of the evening mingled in the darkening sky along with the last birds, and to the untrained eye, they were indistinguishable.
Our bat walk leader, Paul Keim, had already filled us in on all sorts of great details about bats — how they are not rodents, but mammals, that bats inhabit all the continents save Antarctica, and that bats aren't blind at all — though they use echolocation to find their prey, they can see just fine.
But most amazing to me was the stat that bats need to eat their body weight in insects every day to survive. In fact, bats are a major control against those insects that most bug human beings, like mosquitoes and other biting summer nuisances. (Besides bug eating, they also pollinate plants in the Southern Hemisphere, where they are responsible for pollinating about 80 percent of rain forest plants). So the recent threats to bat health, especially White Nose Syndrome (a fungus that kills 95 percent of those it infects) not only kill bats, but can lead to out-of-control insect populations.
So it is in our own human best interest to keep bat populations healthy. Fewer insects means fewer itchy bites, and more importantly, fewer pesticides needed for our food crops - including those in our own gardens!
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