Dwindling of bat population goes seemingly unnoticed
The bat clinging topsy-turvy to a small crack in the stone facade outside the window hasn’t made a move since being spotted in December.
Precisely when the creature settled for its long winter’s nap is unknown. It could have been hanging for weeks hidden in plain sight looking not unlike some curled leaf strangely resistant to the persistent persuasion of wind and gravity.
Leaves and all living things, nonetheless, succumb to the imperatives of nature. Yet a string of summerlike days brought no stirrings on the coarse crib. Presently the bat stays, clearly in a shrunken state, finishing up its long yearly sleep and hopefully holding against the big sleep.
Making a living isn’t easy in an unnatural world. Earth Day is Thursday. During the half century since the inaugural people’s call for environmental action in 1970, the planet has gone from predicament status to crisis to emergency, the last designation accorded by the journal Scientific American only recently.
The globe has been heating. The poles have been melting. Plant and animal life in the wild has started crashing. Forests have been shrinking and burning. Mega-drought has been spreading in the U.S. West. Oceans have been acidifying and weather-shaping currents slowing. Plastics have been despoiling the seas and numerous land-based surfaces. Microplastics
have been entering living bodies. And a pandemic traced possibly to formerly isolated Asian bats has been sweeping civilization.
A person inspecting the animal drowsing heelsover-head praised bats for the work they do as agents of insect control. Almost in the same breath, however, she acknowledged unapologetically her husband, a gardener, is inclined to swat and kill bats that dare flutter too close to hatless heads.
While the killing of a single bat might strike some as unreasonable, the dwindling of bats from almost everybody’s evening sky goes unnoticed and unchecked. Humans have taken out bats in North America by the millions, including sending some species to the brink of extinction, by wiping out habitat, spreading a lethal fungus and shrinking the flying food base.
The world the household bat faces is not so replete with life-sustaining eats as the one in which its ancestors answered the wakeup call of spring. An insect decline estimated at about 9 percent each decade has been occurring in studied locations throughout the world.
An analysis of data completed last year by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research indicated that insect loss has not been as extreme worldwide as suggested by some of the local and regional reports touted by media in recent years.
Nevertheless, the devastation “is extremely serious,” the study’s lead author, Roel Van Kling, told the BBC.
“Over 30 years it means a quarter less insects,” Van Kling said. “And because it’s a mean, there are places where it is much worse than that.”
Flying insects, which are devoured by bats, birds and dragonflies, were among the most affected by losses, the study found. What’s more, the U.S. Midwest was pronounced to be among the places where insect decline has been beyond average.
Turkey time
Young wild turkey hunters age 17 and under today wrap up their two-day shot during the special youth season that opened statewide on Saturday.
The traditional season opened Saturday and continues through May 23 in all but a few northeastern counties, where the start and finish are delayed a week. Hunting hours run a half hour before sunrise until noon through May 2 and a half hour before sunrise to sunset from May 3 until season’s end.
The daily limit is one bearded bird, the season limit two bearded birds.
outdoors@dispatch.com