Watched once as some paddlers I was camping with were ducking and dodging some bats that cruised in at dusk to remove the insect population. My best buddy said they were wasting their time ducking out of the way, as bats were great at avoiding things they didn’t care to smack into. He stood in a bottleneck made by the close treegrowth and let the bats fly past and around his head at a furious rate. One of the other, younger paddlers said that he had to try that, too. It was very cool until the guy sitting next to me, (and NOT ME, you understand) threw a black ball cap and hit the guy in the head.
Knowing that it couldn’t be a bat that just smacked into the back of your head doesn’t help. When something smacks into the back of your head while bats whirl around you, you dance.
Someone asked me what their parents should do about the bats that fly around their swimming pool in the evening. I said they should applaud the little bugzappers.
If only the ball cap would have had the Batman logo on it…
Yeah, Rhea- People forget (or are never given a chance to learn) exactly how beneficial bats and bees are, until their populations start to drop, and we’re bowed under a sudden wave of unwanted insects and season after season of bad crop growth. We tend to think of anything we don’t buy a collar and food for as vermin to be exterminated.
And the proliferation of the electronic bug-zappers that kill beneficial bugs and do almost nothing against mosquitoes only compounds the problem. In one test of 10,000 bugs zapped only 8 were mosquitoes.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/07/970730060806.htm
We put up two barhouses about 15 years ago; a grand investment! Little guys fly around the place at night collecting moths and mosquitos like crazy. We even keep our big shade trees pruned away from the house to give them a free field of flight…
An unrelated investment is native bee housing: mason bees and bumble bees are great pollinators and generally quite mellow. Of course, our lawn was long ago replaced by a nice garden!
If you’re swimming, and go under the water, and come up out of the water while the bat is coming down for a drink, the bat CAN be surprised enough to slam into you. I have watched it happen multiple times. Pretty much the only way to get hit by a bat though.
Bats can fly at people if they are infected with a rabies virus
A bit sad that one of the ads showing on this page is for “The Guardian”, which appears to be a sonic device to repel bats… Somebody’s ad algorithm isn’t quite as good as they think.
Really enjoying the comic, been binge-reading my way through it since yesterday afternoon. I’m somewhere in between Hubris and Mr Mittlief on the activity spectrum, so I can empathize with a lot of the barbs. Nice work!
And yet. I had one fly into my head when I was about 13. I turned around to see what had hit me (in an attic) and there it was, hanging upside down, yelling at me as to why I was in this space that it had memorized!