Seeing in the Dark: On Bats as Companions, Protectors and Muses

Between retreats at the Wolf Conservation Center, I teach boxing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park at dusk. A pack of five women, we have safety in numbers. We meet at Grand Army Plaza and venture into Long Meadow, a huge area of the park that is filled with picnic blankets, dogs of all shapes and sizes, fitness classes, and people reading under the shade of trees during the day but becomes deserted as the sky grows dark.

Long Meadow is just within the perimeter of the park, not far from the road, so the area feels safe, and the best part is that at dusk it feels and looks like another world. We enter via a small path and are soon surrounded by trees. Beyond them, all we see is lamplit green. When we arrive, this busy area of the park is a moody, magical realm where we encounter raccoons and, if we’re lucky, bats. City parks and botanic gardens are my refuge and theirs.

The bats found in Brooklyn go mostly unnoticed, but on summer nights, they fly high above our heads to annihilate mosquitoes. New York City is home to tree bats like eastern red bats and hoary bats that migrate south each year and return mid-April. Adorable cave bats, including little brown bats, big brown bats, and tricolored bats, manage to live in the city year-round. In winter, they hibernate inside or under urban structures, in leaf piles or under the bark of trees. When the weather warms, they roost under bridges and in crevices in rocks, tree hollows, and branches. Bats can live long lives compared to other mammals their size. The oldest recorded bat found in New York was thirty-four years old.

Because they are most active at night, bats depend on echolocation to navigate and locate prey. To echolocate, a bat emits short, high-pitched calls that are outside the range of human hearing. When these calls bounce off an object, bats hear the echo and can almost instantly analyze the sound to determine exactly how far away an object is, how big it is, what it looks like, and even what texture it might have. Contrary to popular belief, bats can actually see with their eyes, too—echolocation just helps make their flying and hunting skills more precise.

I wondered about human noise and the impact on echolocation—How can bats adapt and survive in an increasingly bright city and noisy planet?—and I’ve found conflicting information and studies. Some researchers say that bats are efficient hunters even when it’s too loud to hear their prey—they just ramp up echolocation or rely on other senses—and others say the opposite. A study published in the journal Functional Ecology found that bats exposed to traffic noise produced calls that were up to ten decibels louder than those produced by bats in quiet areas.

But studies also show that bats exposed to simulated traffic noise had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood and were less likely to form breeding pairs, and their offspring were less likely to survive. I imagine the study itself was stressful for the bats, but there is no doubt that like me, they are sensitive to light. Artificial lighting impacts their ability to forage, commute, roost, and hibernate. Basically everything they need to survive.

Like wolves, bats have been associated with witchcraft and demons in European art and fables for centuries. These nocturnal mammals have gotten a bad reputation in everything from horror movies to vampire lore and creepy Halloween decorations, and have been blamed for being a vector of viruses. But by eating mosquitoes that spread diseases like West Nile fever, Zika, and malaria, bats help more than they could possibly harm. In some areas where bat populations have collapsed, the number of mosquitoes has exploded, along with rates of diseases the insects carry. The vast majority of disease spillover from bats to humans is due to human behavior—from selling dead bats in wet markets to feeding pigs mangoes that have been partially eaten by Nipah virus-positive bats.

The truly scary (and absolutely tragic) thing is that today, nearly 40 percent of the bats living in the United States and Canada are endangered or are candidates for the endangered species list, and nearly one third of all bat species worldwide are vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, or “data deficient.” Their steep population decline is largely the result of our destructive and mythmaking species. Habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change, wind turbines, fungal diseases, spooky fables, and human ignorance have all led to the demise of the misunderstood and ecologically vital bat.

In the dark, we listen closely to sounds around us to know whether or not we are safe. If we feel threatened, we may choose to remain quiet and unseen, or to scream and make ourselves known. David George Haskell asserts in Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction that wings—the ability to fly and escape—gave birds and insects the courage to sing and be heard. He writes, “Their wings, like musical instruments, transformed their bodies into resonating chambers, and their voices, honed by the pressure of predator and prey, became expressions of identity, territory, and courtship.”

I once felt safe in the city surrounded by people. I loved to disappear and wander, anonymous, amid a sea of strangers. But after the mugging in 2011, I grew less comfortable going out. My sensitivity to sound heightened and I became hypervigilant. When I had to walk to and from work at night, I imagined owls and bats—skilled at navigating darkness—flying with me, surveying my environment, and two wolves protecting me, flanking my sides. With these invisible creatures beside me, I took up more space, walked with more confidence and awareness, as though channeling their gifts. These creatures became incredibly vivid to me and I could swear others sensed them too.

The more time I spent in New York City, the less I understood it when people said the view of the New York City skyline was beautiful. More and more, it looked like destruction; stars, planets, and constellations lost in the overwhelm of artificial light. Creatures that populated the fairy tales and forests of my childhood seemed to be vanishing, too. Every day I read about habitat loss due to the human desire for more hamburgers, more plastic packaging, golf courses, lifeless lawns, palm-oil-laden snacks, fast fashion, and grotesque McMansions. All empty calories to fill a vacuum inside. An incessant, destructive hunger caused in large part, I think, by a disconnection from Mother Earth.

If I was going to continue living in the city, even for a little while, I needed to find my nook, my tree crevice, my pile of leaves, my cave. My home had to be a soothing sanctuary; my nervous system needed to rest. Inside my apartment at night, as the bats flew through Brooklyn, I surrounded myself with art and lush potted plants and found the right soundtrack—“Crickets on a Summer Night,” “Babbling Brook,” or “Meadow in Spring”—and lulled myself to sleep. Recalibrating in my cave, I was healing, but my body craved more: the hypnotic sound of real crickets, cleansing water I could feel moving around my fingers, and rolling meadows I could walk upon barefoot, away from the overstimulation of the city.

*

When I was young, growing up in Western Massachusetts, I called bats at dusk with intuitive clicks, squeaks, and claps. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it seemed they would gather and circle above me, so in my child mind I imagined they heard and responded to my call. There were so many, dozens and more. Like my love for wolves and so-called weeds, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for bats and other misunderstood creatures. Maybe I identified with them. Often absent from school due to debilitating asthma, I felt like an outsider among my peers and remained silent about my vulnerable body and lungs, embarrassed and ashamed by what I felt was weakness.

With piles of schoolwork I couldn’t ever catch up on, I never really felt comfortable in classes, either. My wild imagination felt constrained when I tried to rein her in to focus on where my academic brain was supposed to be. At home, I doodled and daydreamed, got lost in art and the magic of the forest while immersed in a house filled with music. My mom always said I have the hearing of a bat whose ears are freakishly huge for their head. I hear with my whole body.

I grew up in the realm of music, soul mostly, and people were in and out of the house constantly to learn, collaborate, and record. I overheard the faint hum of bass guitars, the vibration of drums, intricate compositions on keyboards, and the wail of guitars. It was a soothing soundscape and underneath it all was nature. Outside, our small garden and the surrounding woods were my playground, and inside, I played classical piano, saxophone, and, for a short time, guitar. I had a good ear—I was able to hear intervals, understand the emotional palette of different vibratos, emote through breath, intonation, and rhythm—and music moved me. But ultimately, I was compelled to get noise out of my body through words and images, and gravitated to writing and visual arts instead. Music was in me, though. When I began to date I would ask men about the music they listened to; I wanted to know something about the pulse of their inner rhythm, what moved them. I believed the sounds they were drawn to said something about their capacity to feel, and maybe even how they loved.

When relationships lasted, we made mix tapes for each other, carefully recording and curating the perfect song lists from a double tape deck, CD player, or turntable. Each song had meaning. I would carry my Walkman everywhere in the nineties, wearing headphones listening to mixes of Stevie Wonder, Charles Mingus, Debussy, A Tribe Called Quest, Chopin Roy Ayers, Erykah Badu, Miles Davis, Lhasa de Sela, Teena Marie, and the Roots on city streets. Music made me oblivious to the world around me, but sometimes it heightened my experience of the city, and the music would carry me for miles. At home, John Coltrane played in the background. As though my life needed a soundtrack.

Now, more often than not, I choose quiet. Though true quiet is hard to find. It tends to be defined by what it isn’t—no buzz of technology, no gas-powered leaf blowers, no cars rushing by, no chatter of social media—than what it is. Even so-called silence may be punctuated by noise—ambient beats, guided meditations, the ever-present hum of home appliances, my busy mind.

There are nine species of bats found throughout the state of Massachusetts, five of whom are endangered. Most offspring of my flying childhood friends didn’t survive. Human pressures and white-nose syndrome (WNS), a disease that leaves powdery-looking fungal sores on the noses and wings of cave bats and eats away at their skin, have led to a heartbreaking population decline. Imagine being so intensely uncomfortable; it is no wonder bats become restless in winter when they need to be hibernating. And no wonder they become active during the day (perhaps the sun provides relief, drying up some of the damp cold?), burning up fat stores they need to survive. Tragically, most infected bats end up dying of exposure to cold weather or starvation.

Biologists first saw bats suffering from WNS in 2007 in caves near Albany, New York. But according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s official White-Nose Syndrome website, cave explorers in that area took a photo of bats with white powder on their noses the year before, so it seems white-nose syndrome has been in North America since at least 2006. Since its arrival, the deadly fungus has spread rapidly in cave bats and caused devastating mortality. The disease was “accidentally transported by humans” from Eurasia, according to Bat Conservation International. People can move the fungus on their clothing and caving gear and spread the disease into uninfected areas. So far, an estimated 6.7 million bats have died.

Some treatments for WNS are similar to the treatments we use if our digestive system is out of whack—probiotics and antifungals—and I can’t help but wonder if the fungus flourished because delicate cave ecosystems, like the delicate mix of microbes in our own gut, have been disturbed by human-made chemicals or extraction. After the bats deposit their waste, known as guano, on a cave floor, it is processed once again by millions of beetles and billions of decomposing microbes. Bat guano has been used in agriculture in many regions for hundreds of years. In the 1600s in Peru, the Incas valued guano so highly that the punishment for harming the animals who produced it was death. One of the best organic fertilizers out there, in terms of how plants respond to it, is bat guano aged in an arid environment like a cave.

The guano cycle begins with plant matter that is eaten by insects. The insects in turn are eaten and digested by bats. What’s left is perfectly preserved and protected inside the cave—a natural fertilizer warehouse. Caves provide the perfect environment for this to occur, and so that is where most bat guano comes from. But guano needs to be aged in special surroundings before it is used, and it is not a rapidly renewable resource. It takes decades for the raw material from which this fertilizer is made to develop into the magical stuff people use. Harvesting bat guano can damage the ecosystems present in the caves, and it should never be harvested when bats are present. Beginning the process while the bats are inside could jeopardize their survival.

I try to call to the bats now and none come; the night skies are virtually empty in Western Massachusetts. I’m lucky if I see one or two bats at dusk. I see more in New York City. It’s disheartening. And while I’m happy to have them in the city, I know the bright, noisy landscape is an uncomfortable compromise.

*

My escape from Gotham City felt underway. In the sanctuary of my New York City apartment, I hibernated and visioned, dreaming of the life I wanted to live. The Wolf Conservation Center had become a refuge that was helping others connect to nature, but I craved more. I saw friends flying south to places like Central and South America to offer retreats in winter. Why can’t I do that, too? But I didn’t want to be an outsider plopping down in another land amid another culture and ecosystem, no matter how drawn, called, or connected I felt.

Yoga and so-called healing retreats that don’t consider local landscapes are harmful—a form of modern-day colonization, in my opinion—and as areas like Costa Rica become more popular, the threat of gentrification, deforestation, and habitat loss becomes increasingly significant. If I was going to explore and offer retreats elsewhere, I knew it was important to humble myself, learn from local teachers and from the land, and, over time, develop community. We need to adapt to local cultures and landscapes instead of making them adapt to us.

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From Earthly Bodies: Embracing Animal Nature by Vanessa Chakour, published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Vanessa Chakour.