BY JOANNE SASVARI
The Townsend’s big-eared bat is one of the nine species you might meet here on Vancouver Island.
If, upon encountering a bat, your first response is a shudder of revulsion, you are not alone. For as long as humans have gazed at the night sky, the flutter of inky wings has whispered to us of things mysterious and unknowable.
In ancient Greece, the bat was considered sacred by Persephone, the queen of the underworld. In pre-Columbian cultures, it was a symbol of supernatural power. Christian Europe linked it with the devil, evil spirits, witches and, by the end of the 19th century, vampires. In the rational, science-y present day, we worry about the diseases bats might carry.
But we’re still spooked by them.
In truth, bats do us more good than harm. And if any creature is under threat in this scenario, it’s not us humans.
Bats are the world’s only flying mammals, closely related to primates — indeed, the bones in their leathery wings look remarkably like those in a human hand. There are some 1,400 species of bats on the planet, 16 of them in B.C., nine here on Vancouver Island. They have good night vision, navigate by echolocation, hibernate in winter and eat enormous amounts of flying insects, especially mosquitoes, which alone should make us love them. Only a tiny percentage (0.5 per cent) carry rabies and it is vanishingly rare for diseases to jump from bats to humans.
Bats don’t attack humans; they’d rather be left alone. Humans, however, are doing such a splendid job of eradicating bats that half of them here in B.C. are considered species at risk. We’re destroying their habitat, killing them with wind farms, poisoning them, contaminating their food sources and letting our pet cats carry out a full-on bat massacre.
One organization trying to save the Island’s bats is the Habitat Acquisition Trust. Among other things, it conducts an annual bat count and educates people about living with bats or best practices for excluding them (because, while we might appreciate bats, few of us would be comfortable sharing a house with a bunch of them).
It also sells bat boxes, so you can offer bats a place to live that’s not your attic — or in the darker corners of your imagination.