When I installed stadium lighting in my outdoor kitchen, I didn’t expect my most faithful visitors to be a squadron of bats.I don’t know where they hang out, but it must be nearby. The last of the light has barely bled from the sky each evening before they begin to flicker through the patio. Slicing through the night air like shadowy lasers, they sometimes move too fast for the eye to focus. There’s just a fleeting hole in the darkness, soon mended, where they’d been a second before.
Sometimes they emit thin squeaks of delight on encountering a juicy mosquito, or perhaps a particularly charming lady bat. (I shouldn’t joke about these matters; bats are faithful mates.) Sometimes they fail to check their echolocation devices and fly right up to me if I’m sitting in the dark. The look of horror on their little faces is quite humbling.
Bats, like orang utans, are our distant relatives; the brains of flying foxes have more in common with primates than they do with rodents. Their hands have four fingers and a thumb, just like ours. They have a sonar system 1,000 times more sophisticated than anything we’ve ever developed. Some bats live to be nearly 30 years old. When migrating, bats can cruise at over 10,000 feet.
Far more interesting than facts, though, is the way bats weave themselves into the lives and lore of the communities they live in. They are usually admired and sometimes revered. Certainly they are appreciated for their role in pest control — some species eat their weight in mosquitoes every night. In my years of wandering around Southeast Asia, bats have been a recurring theme.
In South America, locals promenade around the town square in the early evening. In Bali, they hang around the bale banjar practicing chants and playing with their fighting cocks. The good folk of Bukitinggi, Sumatra, assemble in the park to watch the giant fruit bats depart for their nightly hunt.
Bukitinggi, one of Indonesia’s better-kept secrets, is perched on the edge of a dramatic geological fault line. The earth split millennia ago, leaving two sheer cliffs at least a hundred meters high in places and several hundred meters apart. In the bottom of the fault and in trees on both sides live colonies of giant fruit bats, known affectionately by locals as ‘flying dogs’. During the day they seem slightly comic and disoriented, hanging upside down from tree branches like bizarre umbrellas. Occasionally they take a clumsy practice turn or two, muttering and squeaking quietly as if being careful not to waken their friends. With a wingspan of over a metre and bodies the size of a fox, they look terribly clumsy close to the ground. But this seeming ungainliness disappears at dusk.
I joined the locals in Panorama Park on my first night in town, taking my place at the fence along the cliff and wondering what they were waiting for. People stood talking quietly then, one after another, the little groups fell silent. They stared expectantly at the sky between the cliffs.
Shapes began to stir and rise out of the darkening shadows far below us. Small groups of three, four, six giant bats detached themselves from the trees and lumbered down the canyon with uncanny grace. Gaining height, heading south, the groups merged and in a few minutes the sky over the canyon was dense with classic bat shapes. High overhead now, the scalloped wings flapped languidly. Then the silhouettes glided away until they were united with the darkness. It was quite a show.
When I was moving to Bali from Singapore, I decided that bats would be an effective mosquito control device, and I sought advice on the internet on how to attract them. An enthusiastic bat specialist from Australia checked in. He dismissed mosquito-eating bats as lacking in drama -— he was also a fan of the giant fruit bat. He counselled me at length on how to raise a baby fruit bat should I be fortunate enough to encounter one in the local market. First, I must immobilize it in a towel to prevent injury (to the bat, although he conceded that a large baby fruit bat in a fit of temper might inadvertently cause some damage). Then I should offer it a toffee or something similar to win it over. Snugly wrapped in a towel and savouring its sweet, it should now be calm enough to ingest a mild sedative and be borne home to the aviary I would construct for it in my garden. Apparently these young bats became devoted to their rescuers and follow them around like dogs. Just what I needed as I tried to establish myself as a respectable newcomer in town —- a large, adoring bat thumping around after me.
One night in a rural Thai market I puzzled over the patterns of delicate bones splayed on a bamboo frame before I realized they were tiny dried bats. The small child beside me sucked thoughtfully on a claw-like bat foot as she watched me figure this out. In North Sulawesi I was offered bat soup for lunch and quickly embraced vegetarianism. My companion indulged, however, and there were indeed a couple whole dead bats in his soup bowl. He didn’t seem to mind that there wasn’t much meat on them. The first time I ever saw a gun was in Bali, a decade ago. An ancient man sat outside a shop on Monkey Forest Road cradling an old shotgun, two dead bats beside him. "Makan," he said.
In Laos, I was strolling through the velvety roadside dust one night when the tree in front of me exploded with bats. Thousands of individuals squealed in alarm, wheeled and fled. One evening in Candidasa a minute bat flew in and took up temporary residence on the door sill just above my head. The fragile brown body hung from a single slender leg. He dozed contentedly as I enjoyed my sundowner, twisting gently to and fro in the cool breeze. When night was well established he yawned, stretched and flitted off in search of supper. He’d just dropped by for drinks.
There are many tall banana plants in the garden of my new house. In front of the porch was a handsome hand of fruit almost ready to harvest. Wayan was sharpening her parang in anticipation when we noticed that a pair of sparrows had built a nest in among the bananas and we agreed to wait until the babies were fledged. I went away and when I returned the plant was gone. Were the bananas sweet? I asked. Wayan shrugged. The fruit had disappeared in a single night, eaten by birds and malam-malam.
This was intriguing. I’d only seen the small insect-eating bats in Bali. Now I sit at night and watch the dark trees across the river. Perhaps a giant fruit bat lurks there, blown off course from the shadowy canyon in Bukitinggi.
