"Bat Facts" by Kate Horowitz
June 2, 2022 Jennifer Lunden, winner of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and a Maine Literary Award, has a book forthcoming from Harper Wave in 2023. For her Read & Loved selection she highlights Maine based science writer and essayist Kate Horowitz’s essay "Bat Facts" which appeared online on A Velvet Giant literary journal. Lunden has this to say about the piece:
Kate Horowitz's "Bat Facts" thrilled me. It indeed contains some fascinating facts about bats. But this short piece does so much more than that, conveying what it's like to move through the world as "a woman-looking animal," and interweaving these threads with lyric fluidity.
Kate Horowitz
An excerpt from “Bat Facts”
The world’s smallest bat is the size of a dandelion puff and weighs less than a penny. The largest bat is probably not something you want to think about. They get pretty big.
Scientists have recorded more than 6,000 mammal species on this earth. Of those, about 1,400 species—or 1 in 5—are bats.
It is wonderful and also not fair that bats are a Halloween animal. Wonderful because bat wings are the perfect shape to carve into a pumpkin’s ribbed rind. Not fair, because they are not monsters.
Everyone remembers Count Dracula turning into a bat. We forget that, just as frequently, he transformed into a giant wolf and a thick, oozy fog. He also scurried vertically up the stone walls of Castle Dracula like a lizard in a Miami motel room. But this is a funny image, a goofy and nonthreatening one, and so it slips our minds.
Some bat species pollinate flowers. Many butterflies drink blood (and urine, and sweat, and tears, and the liquefying flesh of rotting bodies). And yet to humans one of these animals is lovely, and the other the embodiment of everything we should fear.
Baby bats in Costa Rica learn to talk by babbling, like human infants do. “They just babble away, sunrise to sunset, practicing their sounds,” biologist Ahana A. Fernandez told the BBC. The noise, she says, often begins with just one precocious chatterbox. “He babbles for 15 minutes or so, and I can clearly see the ears of the other pups moving…I think they're really listening to each other.”
How could anyone learn this and not want to protect them?
No bat sucks blood. Their jaws are too small, their mouths not shaped for it. The few bat species that do feed on blood lap it up delicately, like kittens at a dish of milk. And they almost never bother with humans.
A male vampire moth, on the other hand, can and will suck human blood for up to 50 minutes.
A pet name I wish someone would call me: Fang.
You can read the full piece here on A Velvet Giant
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