Jacksonville, FL

---

I might not have noticed them if it hadn’t been for our hound. I’d just got out of bed, and walked out back so Shadow could tend to his morning business. Usually, he heads right to the edge of our yard. Instead, as I sipped my coffee, he stopped dead in his tracks.

I walked over to see what had engaged his nose—we often joke our hound is a prisoner of his nose.

Two tiny bats lay on the deck.

Although I’ve certainly seen bats darting around after sundown, I’ve never found one dead. Did they have rabies? A biologist I wrote for once told me to never touch a dead bat because of that possibility. Was someone putting out some sort of poison in our neighborhood? The way the two creatures were positioned seemed strange. I told my husband it looked as though they held hands as they fell out of the sky together. We dubbed them “the twins.”

Although it was Sunday, Cyndi Marks called me within a few hours of receiving my email full of questions. I included a photo. Marks is executive director of the Florida Bat Conservancy. Like so many others who work on behalf of wildlife, she’s dedicated. How many executives would phone a journalist on a Sunday?

Marks told me, based on the photograph, it looks like our bats are Seminoles. “They look like newborns,” she told me. “They live in Pines and Spanish moss. They give birth on the ground sometimes and climb back up the tree.” Seminoles, unlike some other species, can have up to four pups, the term given to bat babies.

Marks says the pups may have fallen as they were feeding. Maybe they grabbed each other instead of the mother and fell to their death that way. She says the photo suggests they had milk in their stomachs.

In talking with Marks, I was reminded of the threats to wildlife from so much development. When I did contract work for the SC Department of Natural Resources, I learned the greatest threat to wildlife is lack of habitat. SCDNR at the time was conducting a project related to Rafinesque’s Big-eared Bat.Marks says she’s done over 2,000 programs about bats. These creatures are most often viewed as pop culture icons of fear at Halloween. But bats are extremely beneficial—some can eat up to 3,000 insects, including our pesky Florida mosquitoes.

The Bat Conservancy conducts programs about these night-flying mammals, and the organization has a book out, Bats of Florida (University Press of Florida, 2006). Visit the Conservancy site on the Web, or better yet, buy a copy of the book. I purchased my copy this morning; I’ll post a review here once I’ve read it. The money certainly goes to a good cause.

As I gazed at the two small creatures on my deck, I was intrigued by physical characteristics I’d never seen up close. The bats’ skin and torso features were strikingly similar to that of a human. I’d seen bats in the flesh before, but because they were live, I’d never actually got an up-close look at their underside.

The way the two were positioned was sad—in their short lives they would have been close together as they nursed, clinging to their mother. It’s likely they clung together as they plummeted to their deaths, probably from the clumps of Spanish moss hanging from the Live Oak whose branches overhang our property. (photo & text by Kay B. Day)

Word Press, Technorati, Tags, bats, wildlife, backyard wildlife, Florida, Jacksonville, species, conservation, mosquitoes, habitat, development