THE scene: a pond on a common in south London, long past 10 pm. The players: a group of bat enthusiasts and their guide, squinting into the darkness. 鈥淭here鈥檚 one! Quick, tune to 21 kilohertz,鈥� someone cries. The enthusiasts tune their detectors, which pick up the high-frequency noises and convert them into 鈥渟macks鈥�, 鈥渢ocks鈥�, 鈥渢icks鈥�, 鈥渃hip-chops鈥� and 鈥渨arbles鈥� that people can hear. The bats come to this pond to drink and hunt insects. The humans come to marvel at these creatures of the night.
Welcome to bat walking, the latest global nature-watching craze. Where there are bats, you鈥檒l likely find a bat-walking group 鈥� and many of them are oversubscribed (see and for local details). With numbers of bats worldwide in decline, conservationists are keen to build on this enthusiasm. Next Saturday (26 August) is European Bat Night, when conservationists in some 30 countries will try to raise awareness of the 45 species of bat that live in Europe through lectures, exhibitions 鈥� and bat walks (see ).
Why all the excitement? People seem to have cottoned on to the fact that bats are strange and fascinating creatures. They are the only flying mammal: their formal name, Chiroptera, comes from the Greek for 鈥渉and wing鈥�, as the open wing resembles an outspread hand but with a membrane between the fingers that also links wing to body. Their sophisticated high-frequency echolocation system makes bats formidable night flyers and hunters. They use the echoes from the sounds they make to create 鈥渁udio maps鈥� of space, to distinguish objects and find prey. And bats are voracious: a single animal can devour up to 1000 mosquitoes an hour.
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Bats also hold a more sinister attraction. They have long been associated in folk tales with foreboding and vampires, and to symbolise ghosts, death and disease. Yet contrary to popular opinion, most are not blood-suckers, preferring insects or the juices of fruits. Of the 1100 bat species worldwide, only three 鈥� all of them of the leaf-nosed family of central and South America (Phyllostomidae) 鈥� drink blood or prey on vertebrates. More promising in the horror stakes are the two species that eat other bats: the spectral bat, also of the Americas, and Australia鈥檚 ghost bat.
鈥淢ore promising in the horror stakes are the two bat species that eat other bats鈥�
Bats can also have a genuinely deadly side, at least in some parts of the world. Their mobility and their evolutionary development alongside humans together make them natural vectors for viruses that can cause diseases such as rabies and West Nile fever. You could hardly describe bat walking as dicing with death though, even if the few people in the US who die each year from rabies usually pick up the disease through being bitten by bats.
