Bats Flying
Just a few weeks after Mothapalooza, I find myself in Alabama looking for a woman with a bat in her hair. It’s the only directive I was given when I asked how I might recognize Vicky Smith, an environmental educator I connected with prior to traveling. She’s my main contact here, at the Southeastern Bat Diversity Network’s Bat Blitz event, during which biologists and volunteers from around the region will be surveying bat populations in Bankhead National Forest. As suggested during registration, I’ve come straight to the main office, which every attendee casually refers to as “Bat Headquarters.”
The bat-in-her-hair description might not have caught me so off guard if not for the fact that, when packing for this excursion, I slipped no fewer than four hair ties into my luggage. Usually, I forget to pack even one. But somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that bats are prone to getting entangled in long hair, and mine is overdue for a cut.
I’d like to think of myself as bat-tolerant, but I’ve arrived at the Bat Blitz looking to become downright bat-positive. I started paying attention to bats some time ago, when one took up residence in my porch eaves. I was wary about having a bat roost so close to my living quarters, but we went on about our respective business—with only a couple of dive-bombing incidents—until, one day, the bat died. When I found a carcass near my front door, I called a wildlife officer, fearing rabies. He told me to leave the bat alone until he could get to it. But before he arrived, a scavenging animal carried the bat away, potential pathogens and all. Even the memory is a little disturbing.
I’ve been trying to get to know these flying mammals, but it’s hard to figure out how I might have an intimate encounter with bats without endangering all of us. So when I heard about this event taking place at the far southern end of the Appalachian chain, I decided to take a road trip.
Bat Headquarters is packed. There are friends reuniting with hugs and salutations. Sodas are fizzing. People who have traveled long distances are piling food onto plates as part of the welcome reception. Finally, I spot Vicky, who has a metallic bat tucked into her ponytail like a crown. She is wearing bat earrings and multiple bat rings that flash silver when she talks with her hands. Her shirt is covered in bat shapes. Her arms are stacked with bat bracelets. And word around camp is that she has a colony of bats back in her bunkhouse on the sprawling summer-camp property we’ve commandeered.
Here, Vicky is known as the “Bat Lady.” She might be the only person in the state of Alabama to have a bat-carrying permit. They’re hard to come by, in part due to the responsibility of caring for the animals and concerns about a variety of diseases, including rabies—something that I have been overconcerned with, statistically. Roughly one percent of the wild bat population is thought to have rabies at any given time, and there are generally only around two cases of human rabies a year in the United States. Yet it is hard to have a conversation about bats without someone bringing it up.
Vicky is caretaker of a small colony of rescue bats, which she introduces at educational presentations. All her animals have injuries that prevent them from returning to the wild, including one bat who was maimed by a domestic cat, the most common reason bats require rehabilitation. “We don’t know a lot about bats,” she says. “If you see a raccoon and you want to learn about it, you could probably follow it for a while, even though it’s nocturnal. But when a bat wants to leave, it’s gone. It’s hard to get a good look at one in the wild.”
This is one of the reasons that Bat Headquarters is so busy. Events like this are one of the only ways that are considered responsible close-range interactions with wild bat populations, even for people working on bats’ behalf the entire year. For several nights, the group will work to see how bats are doing—and to better understand how land management plans might be affecting them.
Wes Stone, a professor from Alabama A&M University who is sitting with Vicky, has 25 years of bat research experience. He’s spent whole summers in forests, capturing and releasing the animals to learn more about them. He was the first person to find that white-nose syndrome, a fungal bat disease, had reached the state of Alabama.
No matter how much care goes into figuring out how to set up research traps, some bat chasers stay up all night without seeing a single animal. It’s always a disappointment, but it’s also a statement on the status of populations, which have, in many cases, been decimated. White-nose syndrome has caused a shocking 90 percent decline in certain bat species in just ten years. For bat chasers, finding bats has always been cool. But finding one of the most fungal-sensitive species now feels like a boon.
When I told friends I was headed to this event, many of their reactions gravitated toward fear. Bats, like darkness, are often associated with death. A psychology study found that they trail just behind maggots in negative perceptions. Sometimes, attendees at Vicky’s lectures, including adults forced to chaperone schoolchildren on field trips, are so afraid of bats that they’ll refuse to look at them. “If you’re frightened by something,” Vicky says, “it probably means you have something to learn from it.”
When I bring up Mothapalooza—still riding high on my Isabella tiger encounter—one of Wes’s students, Karmen, scrunches her nose. “Moths can do a lot to harm crops,” she says. Bats are often defended as important since they eat insects at a rate that saves U.S. farmers pesticide costs and billions of dollars in annual losses. Bats also disperse seeds and, like moths, act as night shift workers, pollinating crops.
Catapulted into the unexpected role of moth public relations agent, I suggest that moths and bats, as maligned creatures, might benefit from their advocates sticking together. Karmen is dubious. But there are some things she appreciates about moths, even if she generally views them as pests. She says, “You’re gonna love this: When bats go after moths, some of them talk back.”
Isabella tiger moths, as it turns out, are particularly good bat communicators. When bats try to eat them, they make their own clicks, telling the bats that they should back off. Moths and bats have coevolved to a level that, when a bat is chasing a moth, a moth can tune its hearing to become more sensitive to bats’ high-pitched calls. And all those moth wings I’ve been swooning over function as invisibility cloaks.
Moth scales absorb bats’ ultrasonic acoustics. When a bat sends out ultrasound, moth scales resonate at frequencies almost perfectly matched, muffling echoes that might have otherwise revealed their location. Each scale on a moth’s wing resonates at a slightly different frequency so that, altogether, they can absorb broadband.
I soon notice that conversations with bat people—which is how bat-chasers tend to refer to themselves—often gravitate toward counter talk about cross-species misunderstandings. “A lot of people seem surprised that bats have fur because the only bats they’ve ever seen are rubber ones used for decoration at Halloween,” Wes says. “And people think they can’t see, that bats are blind—but they see very well.” Still, for bats, echolocation dominates. A bat can read a pine tree down to its individual needles just by how the animal’s pulse-songs are returned to it.
Bats are generally divided into two categories: cave and forest dwellers. Wes’s favorite species are the ones that like to snuggle under the bark of oak and hickory. There are more than 1,400 bat species in the world. Some are loners; others like to congregate. The smallest bat in the world is smaller than my thumb. The largest has a wingspan of three feet. “Most people are surprised by bat diversity,” Wes says. “But there’s joy to be found in it.”
Unfortunately, bats’ bloodsucking reputations prevent a lot of people from viewing them as anything close to joyful. Vampire associations are one of the most frustrating things Vicky deals with in attempting to better interspecies relations, though there isn’t a single bloodthirsty bat species that lives in North America. “People think all bats want to bite them for their blood,” Vicky says, shaking her head.
“Or that they’re going to get tangled in hair,” Karmen says. This draws especially hearty laughter from the group and, from me, a confession. When I admit that I’ve overpacked hair ties, I feel vulnerable in my ignorance, but I’m curious about how I absorbed the notion, and they seem like people who might help me figure it out. Maybe, I suggest, I’m just thinking about it because I’ve been dive-bombed so often? During my most recent neighborhood bat encounter, I didn’t run back into my house, but I was rattled.
Karmen puts a hand on my arm. “You’ve got to remember, bats are better fliers than Tom Cruise in Top Gun. That bat wasn’t looking to crash into you. He was just looking for supper.”
The bat, she explains, wasn’t after me. He was trying to catch the insects encircling my head. “Insects are gonna be attracted to you no matter what because they’re attracted to the carbon dioxide of your breath. And bats are gonna be attracted to you because they’re trying to eat those insects,” she says. “You’re basically a Golden Corral restaurant covered in snacks! You’re a Sunday-after-sermon church buffet! To get insects and bats to leave you alone, you’d have to stop breathing!”
Given that I’ve been out at night more than usual, searching for moths and maggots and all sorts of things, I’ve been hearing bats. Hoping that these enthusiasts might be able to act as interpreters, I explain, “What I’ve been hearing isn’t clicking, it’s more like a tit-tattering.” Before my direct observations, I hadn’t realized bats—famous for vocalizations at pitches beyond my capacity to hear—made so many sounds audible to humans.
“There’s a call they make when hunting,” Wes says. “And one of my students thought she could tell when a bat was about to fly into a net. Sometimes they scream like they’re saying: ‘Help, help!’ And the thing is, other bats do respond, like they’re trying to help. It’s something we see quite a bit.”
Barely recovered from Mothapalooza, I can tell the late-night rigors of Bat Blitz are, for me, going to be a struggle, so I leave the reception to find my bunk. On my way out, a biologist with the same bunkhouse assignment stops me: “Just so you know, there might be bats in the lobby tomorrow morning.”
“A presentation? What time?” I ask. I’m looking forward to seeing Vicky’s bats, but I’d rather not be awakened by a crowd before breakfast.
“No, I mean the bats are staying at our place. The Bat Lady said she usually sleeps with them in her room but sometimes they keep her up. Since she’s with bat people, she asked if they could just stay in the common area. They might already be in there, and I didn’t want you to be startled. I mean, they’re in enclosures, but still.” Already, some attendees have started referring to our cabin as “the Bat House.”
Unsure of what I’m going to find, I walk in complete darkness to the bunkhouse, where I discover that bats have, indeed, entered the building. On the ledge of a dormant fireplace, there is a line of towel-covered enclosures and a note, signed by Vicky: “Bats, do not disturb. If they disturb you, please come get me. They do squawk and fuss.”
The largest enclosure is decorated with a button featuring a bat with glowing orange eyes and bared fangs. “Super Scary,” it says. I’ve seen similar paraphernalia since I arrived at Bat Blitz, because almost all the relevant merch that bat people can find is related to Halloween. So they own the association, embracing holiday decor year-round.
The association of bats with Halloween traces back to the fact that, as they prepare for winter, bats are highly active around the holiday. It also has roots in Celtic Samhain, a festival where people would gather around bonfires for food and merriment. The firelight they created to warm themselves attracted insects. And to those insects, bats were drawn. The bats’ emergence from darkness—followed by their fanciful flight patterns as they scooped insects for dinner—made the Celts view them as erratic spirits pulled from terra incognita.
Calling an eccentric person “batty” any time of the year might have origin in similar behaviors arising from the term “bats in the belfry.” A belfry, as it turns out, is a bell tower. And, because—before electric lights—belfries were havens of cave-like darkness, bats liked to roost in them. When the tower bells rang, the animals were driven out and, disturbed, they often left in frenetic flight patterns. This made people think that the bats were inexplicably wacky when, really, they were just reacting to terrorization. Scared, they looked scary.
From underneath the towel that has been draped over the enclosure to shield bats from the bunkhouse’s artificial light, I can hear them softly chirping. I came to Alabama hoping to commune with these elusive creatures in some meaningful way. Still, it’s hard to believe that we’re already roommates.
Of all my bat housemates, the Egyptian fruit bat known as Aurora is by far the most handsome. I meet her the following morning at a safety meeting that’s required for all bat chasers. It includes presentations about venomous snakes in the region. There’s also a session about downloading topographical maps, since where we’re headed, there is no cell service and people are prone to getting lost. When the merits of local hospitals begin to be discussed, I start to wonder what, exactly, I’ve gotten myself into.
All the while Vicky’s colony—which includes a trio of local microbats—is drawing a crowd. It’s daylight, so their towel curtains have been removed. But, on schedule, they’re sleeping. Aurora is much larger than the others. She has ink-dot eyes and wings that swoop around her body. Some fruit bat species are called “dog bats” because of how closely they resemble puppies. Unlike the microbats, Aurora is stirring, though not much.
The microbats—barely larger than the chubbiest of caterpillars—are most closely related to those we might find this evening. I know that if they spread their wings, they would take up a great deal more space, but the microbats look impossibly small when snoozing. Some bat biologists have noticed that people tend to report bats as being much larger when they see them at night as opposed to during the day. I suppose every animal expands or shrinks in relation to how greatly we fear it in the moment.
A staff member from the on-site kids’ program has decided to stop by. The guy, who appears to be in his twenties, says without diverting his gaze: “I just can’t stop staring. I’m used to seeing bats on TV shows—and that’s exactly what I think of when I think of bats.” He points to Aurora.
Before he started working at the camp, this counselor didn’t know that bats lived in Alabama. He has, since getting a job outdoors, seen plenty of bats around the camp property. “Bats are so quick around here, I can’t really tell what they look like,” he says. “But I didn’t expect them to look like this.”
Even if meeting a bat colony can alleviate some of the physical fear of bats, there’s still the worry of pathogens. For humanity, statistically, viral fear is the bigger boogeyman, especially in the wake of a pandemic. Thankfully, Bat Blitz is the kind of place where, just as you start contemplating things like this, you serendipitously end up walking a wooded trail with a microbiologist.
Kristina Burns, another of Wes’s students, is at Bat Blitz because she never wants to be dependent on other people for her field samples. And chasing bats seems, to her, exceedingly fun, even though the schedule is challenging. “Once you have observed something in the wild and get tuned in to it, you’re always going to remember. You’re always going to be on the lookout. It’s almost addictive.”
Kristina wrote her dissertation on white-nose syndrome. But, since graduation, her work has branched into viral pathogens. There are, at Bat Blitz, several virologists in attendance. Bats have supercharged immune systems that allow them to carry pathogens that are dangerous to humans. The more we destroy their habitat, the closer to us they must come, and the more likely they are to transmit those pathogens.
Bats, one of the most populous mammals in the world, are the only ones known to fly, and it’s thought that this characteristic might contribute to the superpowered immune systems that allow them to carry enormous pathogen loads, because it raises their body temperature in ways that might promote immune system activity—not unlike how humans fight pathogens with fevers. And bats’ capacity to carry viruses might offer a form of hope that’s rarely acknowledged. Because they play host to pathogens that, if let loose in the world, humans would not be able to absorb without falling severely ill.
Scientists might never be able to trace the exact origin of COVID-19, but it’s been well publicized that some people have suggested it was transmitted from bats. Regardless of the specifics, the CDC reports that zoonoses, diseases that spread from animals to humans, represent a large percentage of emerging disease, and bats’ already gloomy reputation has been further damaged by the pandemic, which inspired an outbreak of violence against them around the world. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls bats “one of the most important misunderstood animals.”
The reality is, when we displace and kill bats, their pathogens are free to seek us as hosts. Still, we tend to frame bats as villains rather than superheroes who, under duress, are increasingly unable to maintain their status as living force fields that protect us by holding viral loads at a distance. We depend on bat health to hold back floods of all kinds of fatal-to-human pathogens.
In 2020, studies made advances in understanding bat behavior in Australia, where stressed fruit bat populations are leading to a growth of zoonotic diseases. These bats, which look not unlike my handsomest roommate, are known to immerse their entire heads in flowers, emerging with bright-yellow pollen on their puppy faces. It’s a practice that plays a role in keeping forests diverse and resilient via pollination. Unfortunately, the loss of wild, flowering habitat has been pushing the fruit bats closer to human populations as they attempt to survive by scavenging on agricultural land—leading to contagion.
When a rare flowering event occurred in remaining patches of habitat, researchers found that it was enough to entice bats to return to wilderness areas, and human-bat disease spillover all but disappeared. The bats, getting what they needed while supporting ecosystems, gave greater distance to human settlements, leading to headlines like “Giving a bat flowers might preempt a pandemic.”
We’ve characterized bats as moody goths, but they might be more akin to flower children. Still, we don’t know them well enough to understand exactly what they need. It is what the Forest Service hopes to learn so they can enact updated land management plans. Unfortunately for humanity—which depends on reservoir species and remnant habitat to hold pathogens at bay—private landholders don’t always take other species into account. And bat knowledge must be sought very carefully.
“Bats don’t come sit on your knee like butterflies,” Kristina says. “They have a beauty that’s generally best observed from a distance.”
I’ve been told there’s a survey site near a small cave. It’s the only expedition labeled with a warning on the sign-up sheet: “Strenuous hike!!!” The exclamation marks are intimidating. I sign up anyway.
Every group has a local Forest Service guide, and my group—a collection of wildlife agents, interns, and students—has been assigned Ben Blair, a millennial wildland firefighter who grew up just a few miles from Bankhead National Forest. He is well over six feet tall and boasts a woolen lumberjack beard. In low-fire season, he has been reassigned to wildlife duty. Around Bat Headquarters, he is almost as well-known as Vicky, because Ben is a wildlife officer who is terrified of bats.
He is also afraid of frogs, given an encounter he doesn’t want to recount. And don’t get him started on ticks. He’s not a fan of moths, either. But bats are absolutely one of his least favorite animals. Yet here he is, driving a Forest Service truck toward our survey site, a gorge that hardly ever sees humans. “I get it,” I tell him. “I’m not a fan of spiders.”
He agrees that spiders aren’t great. Still, some of the only nocturnal creatures scarier than bats, to Ben, are snakes. “At the beginning of fire season, I stepped on a rattlesnake, and it didn’t strike me. I’ve been around lots of snakes since then, and they haven’t bitten. It doesn’t mean they won’t, but I’d never thought about a snake passing up a chance to get me. I guess maybe being around bats is going to make me think differently about them, too.”
Ben has already met my roommate Aurora. But she wasn’t much help. “When Vicky pulled those bats out at the meeting, I was so terrified I went into the bathroom to hide for a while.” Ultimately, when the crowd thinned, he came out to look at them. “Those little ones with their wings tucked in weren’t so bad, I guess. I was surprised about how small they are, teeny tiny.”
“You were scared of the big one, the fruit bat?” I ask, amazed that he didn’t swoon over Aurora’s puppy-dog face, as I did.
“I was told bats were vampires from when I was little, and it really looked like one,” Ben says, shaking his head. I also thought Aurora looked like a vampire, but in a lovable, Disney-character way. Movies and fairy tales of all types undoubtedly have a great deal to do with how we view animals, both beloved and seemingly scary. Psychological studies have found that children as young as five, kids who have never had direct encounters with bats, tend to categorize the animals as “bad,” with researchers citing it as an example of how negative stories in media and culture work to shape natural-world fear from an early age.
Western mythos about vampires didn’t originate with bats, despite common perception. Many associations sprang from rumors about a wealthy Romanian man in the 1400s torturing and murdering people. He was known as Dracula, and he was rumored to dip bread in the blood of his victims before eating it. Bram Stoker based his famous story on this Romanian, suggesting that he might be able to disappear in the night, as a bat, after committing violent acts.
It was human bloodthirst that led to the tale of Dracula. Yet, centuries after that mass-murderer died, bats are still paying the price. My housemate Aurora does not imbibe blood. She is currently, however, producing mother’s milk. Unbeknownst to crowds, she has been sheltering a baby under her cape-like wings.
Ben’s been thinking about Vicky’s recent presentation—the part he saw before he started hiding. He was interested in what she had to say about how bats have gotten a bad rap based on how they’re photographed, the only way most people ever see a bat face-to-face. Bat portraits are almost always taken while the animals are in distress. A bat that’s getting a close-up is generally one that’s being restrained under artificial light. Yet when people see the resulting images, they criticize bats, as if to suggest that they should smile more.
“Gah, in real life bats are such little chicken nuggets. They’re just so cute! I love them!” one of the volunteers exclaims. “They can look a little scary when they’re caught, though. That’s true. It’s just like in the pictures. Their mouths are open like they’re screaming, but you can’t hear anything.”
Transcribing the silent screams of bats is part of her day job as an audio technician who conducts surveys. To do so, she often rides around nights with microphones on top of a vehicle to record the echolocation pulses we, as humans, cannot hear. Then she runs them through equipment that turns them into squiggly lines on a screen, visual translations.
In general, she can tell species apart by how many pulses are recorded and the patterns they make. Some calls are transcribed into rocky lines on her screen. Some look flat. “When pulses come close together, like static, it seems like that’s when they’re scared of us, but we’re not quite sure yet.” Regardless, it is a manifestation of bats’ silent song. She has found a way to turn inaudible language into shapes that human minds can process like sheet music.
The cave-adjacent site we’re traveling toward is a full hour’s drive from Bat Headquarters. Halfway there, conversation lulls. Ben turns the radio up. Outside, scenery flashes in a Southern backroad Morse code: House. House. Church. House. Church. Church. Nearly every building is flanked by a security light.
“What’s the coolest bat you’ve seen up close?” an intern asks, passing time. “Mine is probably an evening bat.”
“Red bat, definitely,” says the technician.
“I’ve seen red bats before,” Ben says. “Not close up—from a distance, during a burn.”
Until just a few years ago, scientists could not figure out where red bats, which tend to roost in trees, went during winter. They seemed to just disappear without a trace. Recently, it was discovered that those bats—colored to blend with the trees that shelter them—track leaf season, falling to the ground with leaves in autumn, making cozy insulated leaf-caves for themselves.
It was a shock to bat researchers that the animals weren’t changing location, just strategy. They were simply tracking the life cycle of trees. It’s the type of discovery that Bat Blitz might provide. A change of perspective always has potential to shake loose new knowledge.
There must have been a hundred red bats rising from leaf litter when Ben saw them in that fire. He remembers their dark bodies above white smoke, all of them chased by flames that were licking oxygen from the air so that they, too, would have the strength to keep moving. “It’s interesting, the way a fire behaves,” Ben says. “It’s like an animal in its own way.”
The rest of the Bat Blitz volunteers are envious that he got to bear witness, though the circumstances, in terms of habitat disturbance, were upsetting—and illustrative of why it’s important to understand bat behavior to modify land management plans. Still, for most of the bat lovers, it would have been bucket-list-wondrous to see a cauldron rising like that. For Ben, it was among the most horrifying things he’s ever witnessed.
He turns onto a rutted dirt road that’s guarded by a metal gate. “When I first saw them, I thought they were birds taking off,” he says. “I would have seriously freaked out if I’d known they were bats at the time. I’m glad I didn’t find out until they were already gone.”
There is no trail where we’re headed. No one knows what bat species, if any, we’ll find tonight. Some of the bats at our assigned site might be federally endangered due to white-nose syndrome, and others might be eligible for listing if their population numbers have greatly gone down. This, in addition to land management plans, is one of the survey’s main functions.
It is not actually the fungus that grows around the noses of bats that kills them; it’s that it disturbs their winter rest, forcing them to be active in the wrong season, when there are no insects for them to catch. They exhaust themselves trying to get what they need in a world where they cannot find alignment. In the restlessness of their discomfort, they expend all their bodily energy and, unable to replenish it because they’re out of step with the seasonal dance of their food sources, they ultimately perish.
Halfway into the ravine, someone pauses, creating a domino-effect up the mountain. “What’s going on?” someone shouts from the back.
“We’re just appreciating,” comes a message from the front.
Golden light is filtering through trees. In a group of more than a dozen people, nobody questions the validity of a sunset-appreciation pause, even though we’re nearly sitting on soil due to the severity of the ravine’s incline. Previously, we took a break to pass a giant snail shell down the line. It’s a lovely pace at which to hike.
We left our Forest Service vehicles on an access road above. Even with four-wheel drive, the trucks had been slipping. There is a small chance that game hunters have seen this place, but probably not for a while. Alabama isn’t often lauded as an ecological treasure, but in 2020, it was shown to be one of the most biodiverse states in the nation. Bankhead is part of an area that’s occasionally called America’s Amazon. It’s rainier than Seattle and thought to have more oak tree diversity than Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
At the base of the mountain, our crew flows directly into a dry riverbed. It’s wide and doesn’t seem to have a puddle in it, even though we drove through storms to get here. Even now, rain is thumping against leaves, though it cannot touch us. The overstory is so thick we can no longer see sky.
I balance on large stones that have been polished by long-gone waters. When we take a break to wait for stragglers, Pete Pattavina, a bat biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, points out soft beds of greenery that are growing along the edges of the rocky path, identifying them as dwarf crested iris and liverleaf. “They’re ephemeral wildflowers. Imagine these all blooming in spring.” What seems a deadened pathway of stone is, in season, a river of flowers blooming blue and violet, white and pink.
Ben and a group of the others move downstream, toward an area where there’s flowing water. The ravine is too deep to radio out with walkie-talkies, so we’ve left a sentry at the trucks to ping signals. When we reach a halfway point between our encampment and the one Ben’s stationed at, Pete decides we should erect our bat-catching mist net. To catch bats, Pete explains, it’s important to identify flyways—runways in the sky. “We’re like state troopers setting up a speed trap on a busy road,” Pete says. “We want to funnel animals into an area.”
He pulls out a piece of bent rebar meant to hold our mist-net poles. “Hard to imagine what could have done this,” he says. “Somebody must have had a bad day.”
However it happened, the off-kilter equipment stands to make our job harder. Other members of the group have scattered. No one on-site knows how to proceed. We’re all short, and the pieced-together poles we’re dealing with are over twelve feet in length.
Our goal is to erect them in the forest and run a thin-filament net to catch bats in midair. The trouble is, the ground is stone, so we cannot easily drive the poles in. There’s soft soil on the edges of the river, but it’s hard for us to even hold the bars erect. They’re too tall and wobbly.
I gather rocks to help anchor them. If we don’t get the mist net in place by the time bats start to become active, we risk this being for nothing. “We don’t have much time,” Pete says, dismayed at the state of the net, a jumbled mess.
“I believe in us!” cheers an intern.
“Hey, I’d rather be out here than on a computer, no matter how long this takes,” Pete says.
I walk up and down the substantial net, trying to tease out the knots, as the others attempt to hold the poles in place. All the while, Pete is shouting for us to check for copperheads. Many snakes are nocturnal, same as spiders. And if we’re on the verge of being too late to get out of the bats’ way, we’re also on the cusp of meeting their nighttime compadres.
Our chances of finishing before dark are not looking good. Then, from downriver, reinforcements. Someone has gone to get Ben. “I heard you could use help from some tall people,” he says.
Pete is visibly relieved. “What’s your name again?
“Ben. People keep telling me I’m easy to remember because I’m the guy who’s afraid of bats.”
“You’re afraid of bats and you’re out here—that’s awesome!” the intern says.
Ben shrugs and takes the towering rebar from Pete, who tells him that there’s no mallet in the bag. This doesn’t give Ben pause. He picks up a rock and begins to hammer, stone against metal. “Afraid of bats, my ass!” Pete exclaims in admiration of the muscle flex.
“Still afraid of bats,” Ben says. Fear, after all, isn’t something that can be strong-armed into submission; it’s a complex entanglement.
Once the bars are up, the net unfurls as dark gossamer and Pete runs it up the pole like a flag. Ben is responsible for relaying distress calls, so he heads back downriver.
With the mist net secure, I make my way upstream, preoccupied with avoiding snakes. When I see the audio technician crouched in the riverbed along the way, I ask if she’s found a snake. She has a headlamp on, appearing as a Cyclops, with one shining eye. “No snakes,” she says. “I’m looking for little sparkles. That’s what I call them.”
Her little sparkles are, as it turns out, spiders. She knows a trick to appreciating them. Spiders—like many other creatures with eyeshine capacities, including dogs and cats and frogs—have an iridescent layer of tapetum that reflects. At her urging, I adjust the light that’s been hanging around my neck. I think about how, in certain seasons, this is a river of flowers. And right now, it is glistening with the eyes of spiders.
Spiders are, like bats and moths, crucial nocturnal pollinators. They have a special relationship to flowers and—in alliance with bats—play a great role in securing human food crops. Without spider and bat participation in agricultural activities, humanity would lose vast food supplies. Even after I learned this, though, the news didn’t do much to change my perception of spiders. But what I’m seeing here is that life-sustaining importance translated into beauty that might be powerful enough to override my low-grade arachnophobia.
The riverbed is overflowing with eyes that appear as iridescent pebbles in headlamp light. When I move my head to the left and right, their twinkling covers the riverbed and spills into the forest around us—light reflected by the dewdrop eyes of what must be more than a thousand spiders.
I focus on a single pinprick orb and crouch to zoom in, soon wishing that I hadn’t. I find a spider the size of a small tarantula staring back. Then I zoom in on another spider, smaller than the tip of my pinkie. There are countless species, and the prehistoric vibe of this forest makes it feel like there might well be creatures not yet recorded by science here.
I take one step back. Then another. But the spiders have me surrounded.
From the angle of my headlamp, I can see them in every direction. I could, at will, pinpoint and go after a spider that’s nearly a football field away. Only I don’t want to. That’s not surprising. What’s surprising is the realization that the glittering currents aren’t moving toward me, either. We’re at a standstill. I don’t want to harm these spiders, and they apparently have no interest in pulling me asunder. In any case, we, the humans, are the ones who’ve erected a giant, ensnaring web this evening.
My light, reflected, seems like confirmation that these spiders can see me as I now see them. But neither of us is making a malicious move. This riverbed is the path of least resistance through this gorge—by air or by land—which means it’s a throughway that plenty of animals, seen and unseen, are sharing. The phenomenon of spider-shine isn’t one that I’d want to observe often at close range. But, from a distance, I cannot deny that this waterway of opalescent eyes is teetering on miraculous beauty.
I try to shake off my spider bias. I do my best to accept the scene for what it is: gorgeous. Given the shimmering Milky Way that’s winding along this dark forest floor, I mostly succeed, as I hop stone-to-stone across the newly discovered galaxy.
Pete suggests that I should walk upslope to check out our bat cave of interest before the animals become active. Its entrance is a small one, barely large enough for a couple of humans to slide through comfortably. It’s shrouded by a harp trap that others have set up while we were working on the mist net. The harp trap is, amazingly, exactly what it sounds like: a version of the classical instrument, only, instead of sitting on an opera house stage, it’s guarding a bat cave in Appalachia.
Historically, these traps used metal harp strings. Now, researchers use clear filament that’s a bit more forgiving. There is no way around the strings, so a bat coming out of the harp-blocked cave is required to navigate. Generally, echolocation helps the bat navigate between the first set of strings. But the double-strung harp has a second line of strings that bats cannot maneuver in quick succession, causing them to fall against cords that guide them downward into a canvas bag.
At a makeshift bat-processing station below the cave—a metal camp table that has been laboriously lugged into the gorge—I join Pete and Nick Sharp, a state agent from Alabama Wildlife, along with the rest of the crew, to sit cross-legged on the forest floor.
Idle minutes pass without a bat. Then, an hour.
“I don’t have a good feeling,” Pete says.
Nick shrugs. “Maybe they’re not active because of the rain.” The muggy heat has turned into a damp cool. The whole ravine feels like the interior of a cave.
In time, headlamps get turned off. Our restlessness disintegrates. After a period of listening to zipping backpacks and the crunching of packed snacks, Pete’s voice pipes up: “There’s something glowing over here.”
He’s found a railroad worm, a millipede-looking larval beetle named for patterns that resemble lit windows of a passenger train. Segments of the railroad worm’s body are glowing brightly. I have, in the span of a couple of hours, seen almost as many millipedes here as spiders. Maybe it’s because this place is particularly rich with them—or maybe it’s just because millipedes are nocturnal, active when I’m usually not, crawling on bare ground, where I’m typically not sitting.
Pete lifts the railroad worm. The creature curls into a small ball, a fixed point of light in the center of his palm. “Good job, Pete,” someone says.
He laughs. “It was effortless. All I did was look down.”
We’re still reveling in the discovery when there’s a shout from the direction of the harp trap: “We’ve got a bat! Tricolor!”
“Are those rare?” I ask.
“They are now,” Pete says. “Tricolors might skip ‘threatened’ and go straight to ‘endangered.’”
We prepare the table, laden with magnifying glasses and scales. Pete, suddenly stern, shouts: “Masks on!”
The medical-grade masks we’ve been given are not so much intended to protect us from contracting diseases so much as they’re meant to protect the bat from reverse spillover as COVID variants linger. Humans and bats are not meant to be as close as this, and our masks acknowledge it.
Even those of us who are keeping our hands to ourselves are responsible for wearing respiratory gear and keeping track of equipment that will, ultimately, need to be decontaminated due to potential white-nose spores. I adjust my mask’s double straps. I pinch its metal nose clip. Of all my pandemic worries, this is the weirdest: I’ve got to be careful, or I’ll potentially expose a bat to my pathogens.
The bat has been carried from the harp in a brown lunch bag, which is placed in a plastic cup so that the animal can be weighed. The paper is trembling. And, from within it, the bat is click-clicking.
“We have to make sure we can get the transmitter on this one,” Pete says, pulling out a small board that I recognize as part of a transmitter kit from Copperhead Consulting, a firm that’s best known for its work creating faux bark that can be wrapped around structures to mimic natural habitat. If this had been nearly any other species, we would not be attaching a transmitter. But tricolor bats have proven particularly sensitive to white-nose syndrome and are of special interest. Finding this one is a hopeful sign of populations hanging on.
Pete unpacks a small soldering kit. For a minute, it doesn’t heat. But, then, a small spot of orange. He solders a small wire to the device that will activate the transmitter. It will be attached to this bat like a high-tech version of the stickers put on monarch butterflies by citizen scientists.
“Is the receiver on?” Pete asks a twentysomething volunteer, who nods. Pete has told me that it’s hard to get into this work, and he views the Blitz as a classroom. Pete narrates everything he does. He and Nick are the elder researchers in the group. Staying up all night is, as Pete’s told me several times, mainly a young person’s game. It won’t be long before he’s ready to retire from field duty.
“You want to make sure you don’t overheat the transmitter,” he says. I take a few steps back when he opens the bag to retrieve the bat. An intern notices me jump. I shrug. I’m a little nervous to be at close range, but I trust that these biologists know what they’re doing.
The bat has been chirping, but when the animal is taken in hand, she goes silent, though her mouth is gaping. It is the exact open-mouth expression of almost every bat I’ve ever seen in a photograph. In still photography, this expression makes bats look like they’re trying to bite something—or someone. But, here, even though I cannot hear a thing, I can sense a silent scream. This is not an expression of aggression; it’s an attempt to communicate. It is likely a message akin to: Help me.
“Female, post-lactating,” Nick reports.
This bat has already had her pup. Bats only give birth to one or two a year, and they’ve been known to be able to locate their offspring by voice alone in roosts of thousands. Nick slides on a metal band that will help future bat chasers identify her, making sure to orient the band so that it can be read upside down, since that’s the roosting position in which many animals are found.
Pete uses tiny scissors to trim fur so he can apply adhesive. “She’s not happy with you,” someone says.
“No, she’s not,” Pete acknowledges. “She’s fussy. And when she tells her friends she’s been abducted like this, they’re probably not going to believe it.”
A small moth lands next to the bat, nearly slapping her face with powdery wings. It looks like the bat is calling the moth with a siren song, though the moth has likely been attracted to our lights. It is a peculiar sensation to recognize that we cannot perceive what is going on right in front of us, like watching life with the volume off.
The glue Pete’s using is a medical-grade adhesive that will, in time, wear off. “You only get one chance to do this,” he says, taking a deep breath.
The transmitter is the size of a rice grain. Pete holds the bat with one hand. “They have an indentation at the back of their heads. It’s a natural place to put your finger, and it immobilizes the bat so that they cannot reach your hand to bite it,” he says.
Once the transmitter has been attached to the bat’s skin, Nick has the honor of releasing the animal, which is an art form unto itself.
“If you toss a bat into the air, you might think you’re giving the animal a head start, but that might cause the bat to plop onto the ground,” he explains. “They might be chilly and need to warm up. They might not be ready to go. Sometimes, they just want to hang out in your hand for a while. Every bat is different. We need to let them go under their own power.”
Nick’s hand blooms finger by finger, until it’s fully open. This bat isn’t interested in loitering. She’s ready to take this transmitter on the lam. Since bats don’t have the same lift as bird wings, to gain momentum, many need to fall before they can fly. The animal draws a blurry checkmark in the air, and we remain silent as the tiny bat we’ve examined stretches into a larger creature that, almost immediately, vanishes in the dark.
Later, Pete holds up a receiver that looks like an old television antenna to see if he can determine where the bat went. “That tricolor is up the hill somewhere,” he reports, machine beeping. “She’s probably on a slope trying to chew off that transmitter!”
Now that the bat has been affixed with a tracker, Copperhead Consulting representatives will attempt to find the animal so that scientists will be able to fill in some informational blanks about habitat. “You can locate the roost sometimes. You can learn what habitat they prefer,” Pete says. “Sometimes, all they require is a cluster of leaves. You get a feel for species. You start to understand what we’re doing that’s helping and hurting them.”
He pauses. Insect song fills the air, so loud it makes my eardrums buzz. “I thought I just saw a bat fly down,” Pete says. “But it could have been a giant moth.”
The whirling tails of luna moths, maybe the most beloved of all moth species, evolved because of bats. Those streamers are not just for beauty’s sake; they act to scatter bats’ echolocation—keeping the moths from becoming prey. Details like this are everywhere, examples of how we were all born to dance together. And, continually, I find myself among people who’ve dedicated their lives to better understanding humans’ role in the arrangement.
From the direction of the net, light seems to have multiplied. Two volunteers from Ben’s group have walked up for a visit. They’re passing the mist net along their route. We watch, hopeful.
“They have a bat!” Pete says.
“Let’s take bets,” someone says. “I bet they have a red bat.”
“Big brown bat.”
“Indiana bat.”
“You’ll get points if it’s an Indiana,” Pete says. “That’s pretty unlikely.”
“I bet it’s a tricolor bat with a transmitter on it,” Nick says. The group groans.
It turns out to be a red bat, fluffy as a miniature teddy bear. “Look at that fuzz!”
“Oh, beautiful!”
“I just love red bats.”
“They’re sensitive,” Nick says.
“They’re powerful,” Pete comments.
Someone has brought a long, flat light. They illuminate the bat’s wings from behind. Nick pulls out a small magnifying glass. “Look at those joints,” he says. “They’re not completely formed. This is a juvenile. Adults calcify; that’s how you can tell age.”
This bat isn’t audibly fussing. This bat, from the beginning, is all silent scream. Red bats, forest species who roost in places where air circulates, fare better than cave species with white-nose rates. This meeting is just a record—there will be no trackers attached.
The two volunteers who delivered the red bat from the mist net are amazed that they walked by at just the right time to see her wings catch. “It’s like she got so distracted by our lights that she flew right into the net!” one of them says.
Bat Conservation International has found that bat encounters often take place on patios with artificial lighting or in swimming pools where bats swoop toward insects that are swarming, often in ways that make people view bats’ erratic flight patterns as upsetting. Bats are often found near streetlamps because they are looking for insects, which are drawn to illumination. But bats’ eyes are adapted for low-light conditions, so they’re often painfully dazzled by bright lights. Studies have shown that their hunting accuracy is lowered in the presence of artificial light. Without natural darkness, they cannot access the best of their abilities.
One brown bat and several hours later, we emerge from the ravine. The hike out was strenuous, as advertised. It was also discombobulating. We were able to find our way back only thanks to a trail of glow sticks that some night-familiar biologist had scattered on our way down, reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. As we were climbing, I found a wild turkey feather, which, used as a tool to swipe the night, saved me from being ensnared in spiderwebs, a fate that befell many of my companions.
Already, we’re late for Bat Blitz curfew, and now the rigors of decontamination are slowing us down. Bat fieldwork requires a level of biohazard protocol that looks like a scene straight out of a documentary about the CDC. Anything that was touched requires being wiped down with disinfectant. Post-chase camaraderie mainly consists of passing spray bottles to ensure that, on shoe soles and backpacks, any white-nose fungus encountered will not travel with us. Clothes are shed and put into plastic bags. Masks are disposed of safely.
“How was your introduction to the bat world?” Pete asks when he sees Ben.
“Well, one bit me and I started to develop superhuman powers… just kidding!” Ben laughs. “I stayed away from the first bat. Actually, I ran across the riverbed to get away. But the other two we caught, I got closer. I don’t know. It’s interesting—they didn’t seem all that scary in person, not out here.”
Ben’s surprised that his fear has not expanded in proportion to bats’ widespread wings. The animals seemed bigger in the wild. But his courage seemed to swell in the open air, too.
“Would you say you actually like bats now?” I ask as we get into his truck, smelling of disinfectant.
“I still think their faces are scary,” he says. “But, I have to say, I like their little feet. Bat feet are really, really cool. I might even go so far as to call them cute.”
I sleep until I cannot sleep anymore. It is not enough. When I make my way into daylight just a few hours later, I find the entire community of bat chasers is rousing. The tricolor bat that my group found was the only transmitter-applied bat of the night. But one animal was all it took to activate Copperhead Consulting protocol.
Antennae-carrying technicians are already navigating the steep terrain of the ravine, attempting to catch up with the bat. Now a flight crew has been called in, led by pilot Steve Samoray, a lanky guy with shaggy gray hair that makes him seem more surfer than snake handler.
I run into Steve as he makes his way out of camp, headed for his plane, an actual Bat Mobile with antennae attached to both of its wings. When he takes off from a rural airstrip, he won’t have a destination. He’ll be wholly dedicated to searching for signals emitted from the transmitter on that single tagged bat.
“She could have traveled a mile or two by now,” he says. “Sometimes you’ll think you’ve figured out where they are, and the equipment tells you to go farther. Turn right, turn left—when you’re flying, you just do whatever you have to do to figure out where they’re going.”
No matter what technology you’re using or how many miles you travel, it can be hard to find a bat in the mountains, where topography makes signals bounce in ways that confuse even the most seasoned technicians. They are searching for clues that might help landscape management plans promote life. Sometimes, a single tree left standing can harbor up to 400 bats. And that same tree, taken down, can leave 400 bats homeless, searching for other places to live, potentially closer to human development. So locating a single roost tree stands to make a great deal of difference across species.
When Steve learns that I’ve been staying in the Bat House, he reveals that, though he’s worked with bats for well over twenty years, he’s had some revelations at this event. “I’ve encountered thousands of bats in the wild, but when I saw Vicky’s bats, I realized I’d only seen a handful of bats in sunlight,” he says. “Sometimes, people will send me pictures of a bat hanging from a tree in their yard during the day, and I don’t know how to identify it. In daylight, the colors are so different. Everything looks more detailed, more vibrant.”
If Steve and his crew pick up on a bat signal today, there’s a chance that the ground crew will have to follow up by knocking on doors, carrying antennae for bat chasing, trying to convince private landowners to let them poke around on their property. “Bat biologists have it easy,” he says. “People can get behind bats.”
“Really?” I say. “Pretty much everybody here has told me that their friends have a hard time understanding why they even want to think about bats.”
Steve shrugs. “When you go up to a house and tell them you’d like to look around their property when you’re tracking bats, they seem pretty accepting. But when you tell them you want to look around their house for snakes, they’re like, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ At least bats have legs. I think fear of snakes traces back to the Bible—serpents and all that. There’s always potential for something to happen with wildlife. With anything. To appreciate bats, you learn to keep your distance. But you also learn that you don’t have to throw your hands over your face. You don’t have to cower or cringe. Most of the time, when you encounter a bat, all you need to do is chill and it’ll fly right past.”
Weeks later, Steve makes good on a promise to follow up with a tricolor bat status report. The Copperhead crew was able to pick up on the bat’s transmitter signals after we parted ways, but they soon lost her. No roost was ever located, but not for lack of trying.
Steve hunted for that tricolor bat by plane for days, flying search patterns across Bankhead as, on the ground, teams of technicians hiked through forest, some of them even descending into the tiny cave that had previously been covered by the harp trap. Still, nothing.
“Likely, she found another nice cave to hang out in during the day where our receivers wouldn’t pick her up,” Steve mused, “or she flew out of the forest and is living in someone’s backyard.”
To think that this wild bat, important enough to convene what seems like a military-grade operation, has ended up hanging out in someone’s backyard in suburban Birmingham is almost unbelievable. Basically, if you see a bat, it is best to assume that the animal is something special.
Tricolor bats don’t fly much beyond a 50-mile radius, even in seasonal migration, so I have no chance of seeing this particular bat in my yard, though we’re connected by a long mountain corridor. But there are plenty of other bat species around. I even have a small cave in my neighborhood, and there are trees for roosting on surrounding acreage that has, so far, escaped development.
At Bat Blitz, it seemed a novelty to be rooming with bats, but in reality these creatures reside in backyards and parks all over the place. In almost every form of habitat. In all fifty states. On every continent except Antarctica. Before Bat Blitz, I’d never really been able to appreciate a bat encounter for fear of what might come next.
After all I’ve learned, I’d be happy to host a bat under my house’s eaves. But I understand that my previous porch bat’s activity was partially a message that, in an increasingly developed world, my winged neighbors might need help finding alternative arrangements—even with remnant habitat around. Brushing against moths might be okay, but the bat-human relationship is—like a well-performed tango—one that’s designed to hold tension in distance.
The Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research has found that planting trees in urban areas can lessen human-bat interactions while protecting bats from the ill effects of artificial light. And when people erect bat houses, it gives bats places to roost away from porches as bats work to manage insects like mosquitos and the potential pathogens they themselves carry. There are ways for humanity to dance more gracefully with bats, and that choreography can start with each of us—as individuals, wherever we live. If we can find ways to protect darkness and the various, oft-misunderstood life-forms it holds, darkness might, in turn, help protect us.
I resolve to pick up a bat box at a general store across town. They are typically slender versions of bird boxes that mimic the comfort bats find when they slide under tree bark. I also decide to plant some deciduous trees, since I’ve met so many moths and bats who depend on them. I’m glad to know that Copperhead’s bat-bark technology exists. Still, I’d like to do what I can to prevent the making of a world where faux bark is needed as life support. But before I have time to make any of these yard alterations—enacting my own landscape-management plan—a neighborhood flier instigates a meeting.
I’m standing in my driveway when I see the bat swerving toward me. I don’t hear a peep, though the way she is moving—in a topsy-turvy pattern, not a straight trajectory—indicates that she’s hunting. This might be a brown bat, a common species in my area, or a tricolor bat, since white-nose survivors still fly here. I don’t want to touch this animal any more than I wanted to be a designated bat-handler in Alabama. What I wish to learn is how to, at a distance, be a better-attuned neighbor—starting now.
When the bat flies toward me, I don’t cower. I stand at attention, witnessing. Since I have seen a bat silent screaming from the confines of gloved hands, I wholeheartedly believe this animal wants to keep her distance as much as I want to keep mine. Why, then, have so many storylines pitted us against each other?
After Bat Blitz—where I kept my hair secured in a bun—I tried to figure out where I might have picked up the hair-tangled-bat concept. Hair-related folklore about bats appears around the world, in a variety of cultures, with countless iterations that often involve bats as shape-shifting witches. Groups of bats in flight are, after all, known as cauldrons. But many people believe that in Western folklore, tales of hair-tangled bats have historically been used as a way of controlling women’s mobility, warning them against leaving their houses after dark. While darkness can be full of danger, bats have long been taking the fall for crimes they haven’t committed. And bat positivity, as it turns out, might just be an unexpected form of smashing the patriarchy.
This bat and I are taking back the night right here in my driveway. Frankly, I remain a little uneasy about the situation—and that’s okay. There’s a function of fear that’s useful. It acts as a reminder to give space. With bats, as with lots of things, there is safety in distance. I wouldn’t want to get so comfortable with bats that, at close range, I had the urge to pet them. But fear, taken too far, has the potential to make any animal act erratically. So how might I inch away from a fear of bats while maintaining appropriate distance? I’ve come to think that what bats need—along with many nocturnal beings, and even night itself—might be a renaissance of reverence.
Reverence—an intermingling of love and respect—is a positive, awe-leaning emotion that still encourages situational distance. It’s often associated with religion, because—like those Celtic festivals full of bats and bonfires—it requires that we defer to the concept that there are greater forces at play, things we do not fully understand. The ecology of night, for instance.
In the oasis of my unlit driveway, there are no point-source lights to distract. There are no flyway traps. This bat has darkness to roam. This is a Top Gun flier working in decent conditions, and in her abilities, I have faith.
She can see me, not only with her eyes, but as part of the musical map she is drawing in her mind. This bat is bouncing pulses off the contours of my body, maybe even the lines of my face. There might be, in the swarming insects around me, a clicking Isabella tiger moth in the interspecies conversation taking place. I myself am not a passive bystander. Bats might be associated with death, but I summoned this animal with the carbon dioxide of my exhales, which means that every swoop of her dark wings is a welcome sign that I am breathing. And, post Bat Blitz, my hair is no longer cinched. In fact, it’s loose and flying wild this evening.