my garden’s a battery… full of bats… wheeling and dealing the final blows to moths and craneflies, midges and storm flies… ah yes, storm flies, so-called as they herald and are omens of impending storm, or rain at least… should be called muggy flies for they only ever seem to emerge when the air grows decidedly uncomfortably sticky muggy… how do bats manage not to crash into branches and walls and all the other static and solid obstacles peppering their hunting grounds, like my garden… if I was a bat I’d be a hopeless one, inevitably colliding with trees and comically sliding down the bark wearing a halo of even tinier bats spinning around my dazed batty head… not to mention I don’t particular like moths, to eat that is, I’ve nothing on a personal level against them, after all they have some of the bets names in the natural world but as appetisers not so much…… I once found, or rescued, a long-eared bat from a demolished outbuilding, it had been sleeping, roosting, hibernating more like behind a rotten wooden baton, snug as a bug in a rug… or a bat in a baton… It was still early March, not exactly normal flying time for bats unless it’s a particularly early spring which that years wasn’t… still at least half-asleep, the bat that is, I found a shoe box, filled it with newspaper and shreddings, placed it in another shed nearby with plenty of exit points high up safe from any possibly predators… for two weeks I kept an eye on it and all the while it seemed to sleep, or hibernate, or could well have been half-dead for all I knew, being it was barely breathing… although that’s normal for hibernation… after two weeks I was almost giving up when it finally shivered itself awake and eventually, phew, took flight on a night that was just about bat-flying temperatures… and it was gone to bat another day, and night, and hopefully many more after that.
© 2018 robert greig
