The Bats of Gotham

"Twinkle, twinkle little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
like a tea-tray in the sky."
~ Lewis Carroll

Let’s say it’s a warm summer night and you decide to point a Bat Signal toward the skies above Manhattan. What will you see? Why, you will see bats. Lots of bats, all darting about in the darkness in their slightly ungainly way. They’ll be minding their business, not flying into your hair. They’ll be dining alfresco on pestilence-bearing mosquitoes, doing humanity a huge favor. You simply need to know what to look for.

Discovering what to look for is one reason why, at 8:30 p.m. on the last Friday in July, a night when the moon was almost full...oooOOOOoooo...I joined twenty-five other curious people on a bat walk in Central Park. 

 A Central Park bat (the pale color is due to the photo flash — the bat is brown). 

 Photo by Matt Grayson

The walks, which have taken place three times each July since 2004, are sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). They are led by Brad Klein and Danielle Gustafson, founders of the NYC Bat Group, whose mission is promoting the scientific study and conservation of bats while also encouraging more fondness and less fear of the little critters. On the night I went, we were also accompanied by AMNH Intern Max Engel-Streich.

As we waited on the museum’s steps for the full group to assemble, one of the city's many red-tailed hawks watched from a nook in the Beresford apartments across the street. Soon, as the sky grew darker, the first bats flew out of the eves and overhangs of the Upper West Side in search of a meal. We — a motley crew of adults, preschoolers, grandparents and one teenager — set off to join them, following Brad and Danielle down Iphigene’s Walk into the park. Our destination was herb-scented Tupelo Meadow, where we sat in the grass under a patch of open sky, a canopy of trees all around us. We watched bats fly overhead until it grew too dark to see them and used bat detectors — which amplify the bats' echolocation calls — to listen in as they hunted in the night.

Later, I found this video of bats hurtling above someone’s garden — it was a bit like this. 



Bat Truth v. Bat Fiction
Most of us grew up learning a lot of bad information about bats. The Central Park event is not just a bat walk but also a fact-filled bat seminar, where Brad and Danielle try to replace myths with truths. Some basic bat facts:

1. Central Park is home to Vesper bats. Three species are common: big brown bats, little brown bats and red bats. (It’s true, bats seem to have been named by a literal-minded three-year-old.) Three other species — northern long-eared, silver-haired and hoary bats — are also known to frequent the park.
2. Bats are not rodents; they are members of the order Chiroptera and are genetically closer to primates (including humans) than to mice. 
3. Bats are not blind; in fact, they see fairly well, but echolocation helps them hunt their tiny airborne prey at night and avoid those who would prey on them.
4. Giving new meaning to the term “old bat,” bats live a long time, with the oldest on record reaching 39. 
5. Bats reproduce very slowly, normally giving birth to one offspring a year.
6. Bats are not creepy. Consider mother bats — such good moms. Mothers-to-be roost together during their two-month gestation period to keep each other warm. The little ones — called pups (yes, just like dogs) — live on their mothers’ milk until they’re ready to fly, which these little prodigies can do as soon as three weeks after they’re born.
7. Bats are not a nuisance, they are a blessing. For one thing, they eliminate tons upon tons of mosquitoes every year. According to Bat Conservation International, a single little brown bat can “catch more than 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in just one hour.”
8. While it’s true that some bats are vampires who live on blood, none are Count Dracula, and no vampire bats live north of Mexico. 
9. Less than half of one percent of bats ever contract rabies. But wait — you say you've just read a frightening article about rabid vampire bats biting people in Peru? It's true, and as this article in New Scientist points out, experts believe it's a side-effect of deforestation. But once again, there are no vampire bats north of Mexico. Bats in these parts are docile little insect-eaters, like this fuzzy fellow.

 A silver-haired bat snuggled up for a snooze on a tree in Central Park.

Photo by Ed Lam

Help! Bats Need a Superhero
Right now, several species of bats — led by little brown bats — are facing extinction, and the most urgent problem is a fast-moving disease called White-nose Syndrome, which affects bats that hibernate in caves (as about half of all North American bats do). First discovered in 2006 in a single cave near Albany, New York, White-nose Syndrome has already spread to 14 states and killed over 1 million bats. A new study by Boston University predicts that 99% of little brown bats in the Northeast will be gone in twenty years.

That finding moved the New York Times to publish an editorial calling for a sharp increase in funding for White-nose Syndrome. As the Times said, “Without [bats], the balance of nature will be changed, with potentially significant impact on agriculture and forestry, which have always depended — almost without knowing it — on the role of insectivorous bats.”

Because some evidence suggests that cave enthusiasts have unwittingly spread the disease, the U.S.  Forest Service has closed western caves and mines to humans for at least a year.

For more information on bats and White Nose Syndrome, visit the Bat Conservation International website.


"On the bat's back I do fly
       After summer merrily."
~ William Shakespeare, The Tempest