...in the Belfry

The idea of a fierce Goth mouse that hunts on the wing has a certain appeal.  
To some.
Or to me at least.  

Bats feature in some vivid childhood memories: my sister and me huddled under the dining room table, as the thump of footsteps circles us, punctuated by the whomp of a straw broom swatting the air and making contact with walls and pictures. The sweary battle-cries of our parents, whose bare white legs periodically flash past, and in counterpoint, the tiny high-pitched keening of a bat that has taken a seriously wrong turn in Albuquerque.
​

This is how scientists weigh bats. A tiny vest! Just look at those tiny fingertips! And that frowsy little frown!

​In college, bats kind of saved my life.

My first year at Cornell, I was sitting in one of those enormous classrooms in Goldwin Smith Hall. My life was in tatters, with no money, a boyfriend off the rails, and the prospect of having to retreat home looming over me.

I'd thought there were kind of a lot of bats in Ithaca, but that morning, I nudged the person next to me and had my index finger already pointing up at those flapping scraps of dark when some instinct of self-preservation shut my mouth.

​I realized, with sudden clarity, that there were, in truth, zero bats inside the classroom. That I was, in truth, hallucinating bats. That my subconscious, always a wag, was poking an elbow into my ribs and saying, "Girl, you're bats!"

I did not ignore that message. I made some healthier life choices after that morning, though I have always since kept a weather eye out for warning flaps.

So bats are all right by me.

Knowing my penchant for the little insect-eaters, my favorite skipper constructed a couple of bat-houses and in the summer of '22, we performed the engineering marvel of hoisting one up on a pole high above the home orchard at the Would-Be Farm.
The other went up on the south-facing peak of the barn.

My favorite skipper has since kept up a steady stream of batty complaints.
"We don't have any bats," he will tell anyone.
"We have them, but he just doesn't see them," I will add to Jeff's declaration.
"I built two bat houses. 100 bats per house and we don't have a single bat," he grouses.
I make the correction with gritted teeth, "We don't have any YET."  We're like old married people sometimes. 

But the truth is, I have an eye for bats, and Jeff seemingly does not.

​
This summer, however, has categorically refuted Jeff's hypothesis.  Mr. Linton stepped into the cabin, and said, with restrained emotion of some sort. (Ire? Shock? Outrage?) "There was a BAT in my PANTS."

Okay. What?!

For a literal thinker, this kind of statement sets all circuits buzzing and causes a momentary freeze response.

Jeff brought me up to speed: As is his wont, he'd removed his very wet and dirty trousers and tossed them over the porch railing to air out the day before. He went outside in the morning and, in preparation to folding them, he held up the trousers, gave them a brisk snap, and Voilá! a chunky brown bat tumbled out of a pantleg. 

And it was still on the porch. 

"Aww," I said, pulling on a pair of work gloves. "The poor thing is stunned."

As I reached to lift the velvety creature, the bat looked up and opened its jaws like a nightmare and hissed. I drew back and it flapped unsteadily off.

"Well we certainly have bats," I said to Jeff. (I didn't add that this should put an end to our perpetual wrangling about them, for pity's sake. But really, it should.)

Then, a few weeks later, I noticed a few mouse-like turds under the bat house at the barn. (The varieties of scat I contemplate on the regular here at the Farm surprises me. We like to refer to it as spoor, as if we are tracking big cats on the veldt.)

A consult with the Goog, and then the careful use of telephoto revealed yet more proof: The bat house has an inhabitant! Whoohoo!

If you build it, they WILL come. 

And, let's not lose this particular bit of Google gold: a bat's guano can be differentiated from mousey dung by the degree of sparkle. I kid you not. Bats cannot digest the crunchy outer shell and the iridescent wings of the insects they devour. 

Sparkle poop. It doesn't particularly show in the photos I took, but...Just another cool feature of die fledermaus. ​

Bonus Chiroptera (from the Greek for "hand-wing")-adjacent material: Did you know that as part of the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) program during the Great Depression, we spent around $6.5million across 4 years to support unemployed theater professionals?  
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I love hearing that part of the FDR plan to help the country recover from the stock market crash and subsequent depression was to rebuild the cultural institutions of our society.  How radical!

Out-of-work actors, writers, directors, costumers, janitors, secretaries, and so forth, as made up the country's live theater found employment through the Federal Theater.  For instance "The Bat," a Broadway hit that the Federal Theater staged in various non-Broadway-ish spots around the nation...

Meanwhile, my grandfather enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, another WPA program, where he lived in company with dozens of other young men in a camp, where they were fed, given the odd lecture, sometimes shown a play by the Federal Theater company, all the while building parks and roads. 

Just hangin' out with the bats at Carlsbad Caverns.

You want more bat content? Or WPA content? Here's a couple of links:
https://www.batcon.org/the-scoop-on-bat-poop/
http://www.amysmithlinton.com/blog/meanwhile-on-the-farm
​https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/wpa-federal-theatre-project/