A World Upside Down

Their dung makes for top quality nitrogenous plant fertiliser and is harvested for this. Some of the enzymes in the stuff are used in cleansing agents for laundry detergents. Ah, now for a fairness cream, made from bat dung — think of the advertising potential! As for looks, well, it’s the eye of the beholder — they are cute (many young girls would agree!) in their sheer alleged ugliness. Seventy per cent are pest controllers par excellence and a single little brown bat can account for over 1,000 mosquitoes an hour! Keep one in your room and sleep well, and you can rest assured, it will never bump into you. Because they use echolocation; emitting high-pitched squeaks (inaudible to us) that bounce off potential victims, back to them and enable them to lock onto their targets. Just think: a mosquito is (before meals) slim and filamentous — ethereal. Yet the bat’s ultrasound bounces off it and tells it not only of its presence, but airspeed, direction of flight, whether it is getting closer or farther away, so that it can lock on and wham. Think of all the computing — signals whizzing back and forth and course corrections ordered — that go on in that tiny head, in those infinitesimal moments. Large colonies of bats can account for pestiferous insects in hundreds of tons per year. And then produce fertiliser…

They’re great pollinators and seed dispersers — of bananas, figs, mangoes, cashews and agave (Tequila! Tequila!), but alas consume a lot of fruit — which we, of course, object to. They’re the only mammals that can fly. Their wings evolved after they started jumping from tree to tree. And they are more closely related to us than to rats and mice. As for vampires, frankly most of us have never met a vampire bat, but human blood-suckers and vampires? Another matter altogether…

The order called Chiroptera is Greek for “hand-wing”. There are big, mega-bats — the flying foxes or fruit bats — and little insectivorous bats (microbats) that get after moths and mosquitoes and other insects. The Indian flying fox has a wingspan of a whopping 5 feet. The smallest, the humming bird bat, has a wingspan of 6 inches. Years ago, in Bombay, I used to watch fruit bats roosting on a peepal tree outside my verandah, take off at dusk, like a squadron of heavy bombers setting off. By dawn they were back, roosting, though you could hardly spot them. The little insectivorous bats would often flit into our verandah and flutter around at top speed as we held our breath and switched off the fans (not that they were likely to hit them). All too soon, they’d zoom out into the dark having duly enlivened the evening. Drive down the avenues of New Delhi, Motilal Nehru Marg, for example, early in the morning and you’ll hear them chittering as they hang themselves like folded umbrellas and prepare to sleep. Another place I saw them some years ago was in the Roshanara Gardens, in north Delhi.

There are over 1,000 species world-wide (the figure varies), over 100 in India and they have been around for 50 million years. They are slow breeders, and their numbers are declining. They haven’t been studied as, perhaps, they ought to have been. Probably people are afraid how that would look in their CVs… In India, fruit bats are considered “vermin” (orchard raiding again) and can be killed at will, and only now some have been offered some kind of protection. Some bats may live for over 30 years.

Besides, they gave us Batman, Batwoman and the Batmobile….

Ranjit Lal is an author, environmentalist and bird watcher. In this new column, he will reflect on the eccentricities and absurdities of nature