How you view bats is all relative, it seems

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2018 (3071 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am not proud to admit this, but I have always been a little creeped out by bats.

Bats have never done anything to me personally, but, thanks to the monster movies I watched from behind my hands when I was a kid, they have earned an alarming reputation.

Sure, I realize bats play an important role in the ecology, and I always thought it was cool that Dracula got to wear an awesome black cape and, whenever he felt like it, could turn into a bat, flap his wings and fly away.

But, as a general rule of thumb, my limited understanding of bats was that they spent most of their time hanging around upside down in caves waiting for the first opportunity to bite you, or some other hapless human, on the neck and drain every drop of blood from your body. So, in that sense, bats reminded me of federal politicians and teenagers.

But I am rethinking my biased view of bats based on a heart-felt conversation I had with my sister-in-law during a family brunch at the Qualico Family Centre in Assiniboine Park.

It turns out my sister-in-law is heading to Australia for three months, mostly to spend time with her son and his wife and their kids, but also to spend two weeks with her best friend working at a bat sanctuary.

“We’re going to be rehabilitating bats,” is what she told everyone as I stuffed bacon and hash browns into my mouth. “Bats?” I grunted through a mouthful of food. “You mean, like, cricket bats?”

My sister-in-law smiled politely. “No,” she explained, “I’m talking about batty bats, the ones with wings.”

At this point, everyone at the table stopped shovelling food into their mouths and scrunched their faces up to convey the concept that it was hard to understand why an otherwise sane human being would willingly touch a bat that was not carved out of wood.

“Why are you doing this?” we all screeched at roughly the same time.

“Because my friend really loves bats,” is what my sister-in-law replied.

Which, to my way of thinking, was not the best possible reason for spending a good chunk of your vacation getting up close and personal with bats, although I didn’t mention this at the time because I was focusing on my bacon.

It turns out bats in Australia have been having a rough time lately because of a blistering heat wave. Here is a headline from a story last month in the Washington Post: “It’s so hot in Australia that bats’ brains are frying.”

According to this story, hundreds of flying fox bats are dropping dead because they don’t have enough natural cover to protect themselves from the sweltering heat.

In Melbourne, “bat-crazy” volunteers have been using backpack water sprayers to prevent a colony of bats from overheating, according tom the Australian newspaper.

While her friend can’t wait to get her mitts on some needy bats, my sister-in-law expects she will spend her time cutting up fruit to feed them, and, hopefully, helping to rehabilitate some kangaroos and wallabies, too.

Still, I couldn’t shake the image of her cuddling an innocent bat.

“How big are these bats, by the way?” I wanted to know.

Which is when my sister-in-law frowned and held her hands apart as though she was cradling an imaginary watermelon.

“About this big,” she said as our eyeballs grew to the size of manhole covers. “Some of them are the size of standard chihuahuas, except they have, like, a six-foot wingspan.”

I felt compelled to ask the following question: “What if one of them bites you?”

My sister-in-law didn’t hesitate. “We had to get rabies shots before going to the clinic,” she told everyone. “They can carry some kind of rabies-like virus apparently.”

Which is when we all adopted moony faces to convey the fact that we would not wish to see her die of an obscure bat-related illness.

“It’s not really a big deal,” she continued, calmly.

“It’s extremely rare. Hardly anyone dies of this virus. I think only three people have ever died from this virus in all of Australia.”

I smiled what I hoped was a brave smile. “Only three,” I chirped. “Well, those are pretty good odds.”

So we all made supportive clucking noises to convey the fact that we all think my sister-in-law is brave for donating her time to help an innocent creature that mostly eats insects and fruit and hardly ever gets rabies, except in scary movies wherein it carries off stray sheep.

The truth is the monster movies I watched when I was a kid were a bad source of information about bats, which are good for the environment and almost never bite humans in the neck, even if we deserve it. And it seems that bats, especially the ones in Australia, could use a helping hand from kind-hearted humans who are not as squeamish as I am.

I’m confident my plucky sister-in-law is going to have a great time Down Under, although, I warned her that she still needs to keep her eyes wide open all the time and be ready to run for her life at a moment’s notice.

Because you never know when you’re going to run into a group of teenagers or federal politicians.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca