by Pete Dunne

I discovered bats and baseball at about the same young age--a statement that seems self-evident, except that the bats I’m referring to are the flying mammalian kind. Our "sandlot" games were commonly played on the suburban street where I grew up, and just about the time the street light on the utility pole that served as third base blinked on, the evening’s first bats took the field. They came to the light like moths to the flame--or, more correctly, they came for the moths that were drawn to the incandescent flame. They swirled like leaves in an eddy, but theirs was a calculated madness, the darts and twists and accelerated turns directed by purpose, intelligence, and hunger. Sometimes you would even hear the snap of their jaws closing over some insect.

If this were all there was to bats, it would be enough to command the fascination of the scraped-knee future all-stars. But there was one more trait that bats had that endeared them to me forever. They would play with you. Standing below the streetlight, official Spaulding baseball in my right palm, I’d wait for one of the darting forms to head my way. Then, leading the furry little missile by a good twenty feet, I’d lob the ball into its path. Baseballs and insects must offer similar readings on a bat’s sonar receptors, because invariably the bat would try to intercept the ball--sometimes swinging toward it if my aim was poor; sometimes following the ball to earth when gravity asserted itself. Occasionally I could snooker a bat three times, but that was the limit. Intelligent creatures, they soon learned that the ball had no bearing on their lives. Although I never made contact with bat-directed balls, it didn’t matter. I never made contact with a pitched ball, either. I could hardly fault bats for sharing my own shortcomings.

What did matter was that prior to bats, all the animals I had ever encountered wanted nothing to do with people. But bats not only reacted to people, they also reacted positively. They’d go for a thrown ball! Even our dog wouldn’t do that.

It’s a sad fact that by and large, people do not react as positively to the earth’s only flying mammals as bats react to tossed baseballs. These creatures, whose specialized adaptations should inspire wonder, more often inspire fear and loathing instead. To clear up some misconceptions:

• Bats do not try to entangle themselves in people’s hair. Unless your hair is a host to a flying insect hatch, bats have no use for it.
• Bats are not reservoirs of rabies any more than any other mammal group.
• Bats are not blind. Though small, their eyes work perfectly fine.

• Bats, with the exception of the very specialized vampire bat of South America, do not drink blood. Some bats eat fruit; some drink nectar. Those in New Jersey are highly insectivorous and as such make very welcome neighbors. Why? Because mosquitoes are among their favorite prey. Sweeping through the night, sending out vocal pulses, bats search for prey. These search-mode emissions have a low pulse rate, of long duration, and are emitted at a high frequency--well beyond the hearing of most people. When an insect is detected, its "image" returns to the bat as an echo. Closing on the echo, the bat increases the rate of emissions and lowers the pitch to offer more precise guidance at close quarters. Victims may be snapped up in open jaws or swept out of the air by membranous wings.

How many mosquitoes can a bat dispatch in a night? I don’t know--although no doubt someone has made this calculation--but two things I know for certain. One, bats consume far more mosquitoes than the celebrated Purple Martin, whose taste for mosquitoes is legendary, and largely fraudulent. For one thing, the Purple Martin, a large swallow, feeds during daylight; mosquitoes, on the other hand, are not particularly active in daylight hours. For another thing, as prey, mosquitoes are energetically unsuited for martins--a fancy way of saying, too small for the bird to bother with.

The other certainty is that bats are far more effective mosquito control agents than those ultraviolet insect-zapping lights that ring the patios of mosquitophobic homeowners. How do I know? Because those lights aren’t particularly attractive to biting insects (which home in on carbon dioxide, humidity, and chemicals in mammalian sweat). The lights kill lots of insects, many of them beneficial and beautiful, but they don’t whack appreciable numbers of mosquitoes. If you want to cull the mosquitoes, put up a few commercial bat houses. You’ll have fewer mosquitoes, and the neighbors won’t have to put up with the noisy snap, crackle and pop of insect incinerators.

The bat that shared my youth was the little brown bat, a flying mouse of a creature whose body is as long as a thumb and whose wings would have to stretch to span the length of a soda can. Occasionally I’d see a big brown bat, whose 3-inch body and 12-inch wingspan simply dwarfed its smaller cousin. Both of these bats hibernate during colder months--some locally, sometimes in houses, but more often in large aggregations in caves. There was one celebrated New Jersey "invasion" of bats that occurred in Hibernia in 1972 and came about when an abandoned iron mine, a traditional winter refuge, was sealed. Thousands of hibernation-minded bats were forced to find new quarters. The brunt of the refugee problem was borne by local homeowners, whose dwellings, at least in the small (but perfectly functional) eyes of bats, made acceptable substitutes.

In my later years, the bat I became more familiar with was the red bat, a creature of Irish Setter-red suffused with white that has two attributes more commonly attributed to birds. First, they are sexually dimorphic, meaning that males are more brightly colored than females. Second, they are migratory. In October, in broad daylight, you can often see red bats migrating down the coast, even coming in from offshore. Often the presence of an incoming bat is heralded by the hawking antics of the gulls or falcons that pursue them. I have seen Peregrine Falcons chasing and capturing bats out over open water where a falcon has all the advantage. The bat is more agile than the bird but also more exhausted. Adding to a bat’s misery, one pursuing falcon often draws more. Few red bats, once pursued, ever gain the safety of shore. Those that do take refuge in the trees, and I have found them hanging upside down among the brightly colored foliage, look for all the world like a tightly curled red leaf.

I have also encountered red bats at night, on those occasions when I have helped to capture and band migrating owls. The mesh of the nets used to capture owls is large enough to allow bats to escape--but now and again one particularly impatient bat becomes entangled. Sometimes just a shake or two will dislodge the intruder, and sometimes not. Rather than risk injury to a well-enmeshed bat or well-intentioned fingers (just because bats don’t drink blood, it doesn’t mean they don’t bite), my policy has always been laissez-faire. Bats are equipped with wonderfully sharp teeth that can cut a path through mesh as easily as a garment worker’s shears cut cloth. If the escape maneuver results in the bat’s being grounded beneath a net, then I’ll lend a helping hand. Bats cannot fly once grounded. They require a short free fall or, barring this, a lofting boost.

Perhaps the oddest encounter with a bat I have ever been party to occurred in our kitchen. One morning my wife, Linda, was finishing the dishes in a dishpan when she discovered a bat lying at the bottom of the sink. Though very wet, it was nevertheless very much alive. Linda thoughtfully wrapped the creature in a towel, carried it to the porch railing and set it down. The bat calmly worked its way into a comfortable position; then, hanging head down, it groomed itself clean and flew away. How it came to be in the sink remains a mystery.