Murciélagos

Murciélagos is the Spanish word for bats. I estimate that we live with about a hundred of them, maybe more. That’s right, 1-0-0. Curious about our little winged furry friends, I sat down in a corner of the back porch at dusk and watched as the bats came out of the house to start their nocturnal bug gorging fest. I stopped counting at fifty because by then it was too dark for me to see. They popped out of the tiny entrance to their roost in groups of two or three. Then they swooped low to clear the roof of the porch and fluttered right over my head into the night sky.

This would be a good time to dispel some myths and misunderstandings about bats. First of all, they do not get tangled in your hair. I don’t know where this silly myth came from, but bats want nothing to do with your head. It may be their seemingly erratic flight patterns that brought about this myth. Secondly, though they can have rabies and other sorts of nasty pathogens, only half a percent of bats carry the disease. It is extremely rare for humans or domestic animals to get rabies from a bat. Another myth is that they suck blood. True, there are three species that feed on the blood of cattle or other animals, but they do not harm their host and they do not usually feed on humans. The three types that do feed on blood use their scalpel sharp teeth to make a tiny incision, then lap up the blood that flows out. Their saliva contains a special anticoagulant that keeps the blood flowing as long as they are feeding. A meal would be just a couple of teaspoons of blood. Finally, the expression “blind as a bat” notwithstanding, they are not blind. There are two orders of bats – megachiroptera and microchiroptera. The mega bats have large eyes and use their excellent eye sight to find fruit and flowers for pollen and nectar. The micro bats feed mainly on insects, and use echolocation to find their prey. Their eyesight is poorly developed, but they are not blind.

I have had several opportunities to observe them up close. Unfortunately, most of these were not good for the bat. One morning, I found a bat treading water in the dogs’ water bowl. I put on the leather gloves I always wear when handling the bats and wrapped it up in a washcloth and put it in a warm place in the laundry room until dusk. That night I released it. It seemed groggy at first, but flew off. That story had a happy ending. Others did not. There was the bat I found with torn wings – maybe a near miss by an owl. That one did not survive. Then there was the stiff as a board bat I found in the laundry room. It had crawled out of the wrong hole in the roof and got stuck in there and died, still hanging upside down on the wall.

Our bats are not the blood drinking sort; rather they consume probably thousands of insects a night. Mosquitoes here are bad enough even with the bats, I don’t want to think about what their numbers would be without their bat predators. For this reason, and because I think they are cute, and because of our live and let live attitude towards wildlife (which makes exceptions for any centipedes I find in the house) we let them be, even though they make noise all night and their guano stinks. Stinky droppings aside, they are clean animals, spending hours each day grooming themselves and their roost mates.