Bats!
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| Big-eared Townsend Bat |
- Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. They belong to the order Chiroptera, which means, “hand-wing”, and if you look closely at their wings, it makes perfect sense. The bones in their wings are actually like elongated fingers covered with a thin, skin-like membrane, and they fly by spreading these “digits” out. Bats can out-maneuver most birds when in free-flight too, though can be picked off by owls when first emerging at dusk from their roosts.
- There are around 1200 species of bats in the world, with over 70 of them living in the Sonoran Desert region of Arizona. They all play an important role in our ecosystem. Some feed on night-flying insects, some pollinate plants, and some disperse seeds throughout the desert. Nectar-eating bats pollinate many important plants, and in some cases they are the only pollinators. For example, the endangered Lesser Long-nosed Bats only eat the fruit and nectar of night-blooming cacti including saguaro, cardon, and organ pipe, as well as several agave species. Others feed on cactus fruit for their main diet, and then “plant” the seeds, already coated with fertilizer.
- Bats are not blind. They see quite well, and in fact, many fruit-eating bats hunt food using only their eyesight. But all insect-eating bats hunt by echolocation, projecting high-frequency sounds from their mouth and then listening for the echo in order to locate their prey. It’s a good thing that we can’t hear them do this, because essentially they are “screaming” as they fly. They can vary their sounds according to what they are hunting, and their ability to echo-locate is so sensitive that they are capable of tracking the tiniest insect in total darkness. Insect researchers in Mozambique have discovered that some moths have evolved to be able to emit high-frequency screams back at the bats in an effort to “jam their radar”. Wow. We humans have only begun to learn all the trippy stuff that goes on in nature, eh. It’s so great that there are plenty of bat biologists and other scientists helping the rest of us overcome our unfounded fears and prejudice!
- All bats can see humans with their eyes and/or echolocation, so scientists have speculated that bats that occasionally fly close to people might be doing so because the carbon dioxide that we exhale attracts mosquitoes, which the bats may be chasing. Insect-eating bats eat literally tons of insects every night. If we didn't have this natural pest control, we would be overrun with night-flying insects such as moths, beetles, flies and mosquitoes.
I am so fortunate
to have learned a lot about bats during my years as director of Magnuson
Nature Programs from Christopher Anderson of the WA Dept. of Fish &
Wildlife, and Michelle Noe of Bats Northwest, and to have the chance to observe bats with them at the Magnuson Wetlands. I’m sure that spectacle of witnessing the bats emerge from
their roost in the Montana Mine at Ruby during the summer months has made some
Arivaca residents big bat fans too.
I hope to see that spectacle someday too, but have been so happy to be able to regularly
see bats flying through my garden during most sunsets, even in winter.
For more information about these amazing animals, check out the following websites:
For more information about these amazing animals, check out the following websites:
Photo credits:
Big-eared Townsend Bat by PD-USGov, public domain
Lesser Long-nosed Bat by Merlin D. Tuttle, Bat Conservation International
