FRIENDS OR FOES?

This article investigates whether bats and humans can live together in harmony - Claire Olivier

Imagine a boxing match. In the red corner, we have a creepy bat. “Don’t bats spread Covid?”, I hear you say. And don’t they drink blood and turn into vampires? Surely, it’s a well known fact that they fly into your hair at night just to terrorize you...

Or do they?

In order to investigate whether bats and humans can live in harmony, Mrs Olivier decided to visit the Natural History Museum of Bourges where she met bat expert Amelie Chrétien.

First of all, Amelie reminds us that bats are mammals too and very similar to humans. Just look at our skeletons.

That’s right - we have the same rib

cage, pelvis, arms and very similar jaws and skulls. Bats give birth to life babies that they breastfeed. When Amelie rescues baby bats, she has to feed them kitten milk from a paintbrush - just like a mommy bat!

There is also no evidence that bats do cause Covid and, in fact, they actually eat mosquitos and prevent malaria and other diseases. Did you know that one bat can eat 600

mosquitos?

So what about our side of the boxing ring? According to the Museum of Bourges, we are definitely far scarier than bats. Bats drown in our swimming pools and get stuck in our fences. They die on our road and in our windscreen wipers. We poison them, throw stones at them, chase them from our houses (which are their homes too) and pollute the skies with electric lights so they can’t hunt.

This looks hopeless but Amelie has good news for us.

Saving the Climate and Saving the Bats

Bats are a lot like 6th graders - very curious little creatures. To a bat, a wind farm is like a giant forest of trees. Until they get sliced to death by the blades.

Wind energy is becoming a very popular fuel source in France and the rest of Europe where it is designed to save the environment by reducing air pollution but many bats and birds pay a heavy price when they get sliced by the blades.

The university staff made an agreement with the France Énergie Éolienne (the owners of the wind farms) to develop a creative way to save the bats and keep the farms productive.

The museum staff mapped where they found the dead bats and when they found them so that they could let the wind farms know when the bats would be flying.

The blades turn at a speed of up to 280 km/hr and during the period when the bats fly into France (migration period), the museum has arranged for the wind farms to slow down the blades.

This results in only a 3% loss of production but saves 90% of the bats flying through the farms.

Paths of Darkness

Bats like rhinolophes, barbastelles and grands murins cannot live in areas that are lit by artificial lights. The museum has negotiated with the cities to change the lighting in the areas where the bats have babies.

The big red blog is Paris and you can see how much light pollution is being produced . Bourges is the much smaller red dot on the bottom right hand corner because the museum persuaded the city to use safer lights and actually switch off their lights during breeding seasons so the bats could find husbands and wives and have bat families.

Mommy, I’m hungry

Amelie took us into the bat sanctuary where they rescue baby bats and injured animals.

Firstly, they help residents to make bat homes (“nichoirs”) in their own buildings. Guess what? One of the bat nests was on the roof of my home!

Secondly, people can bring in bats if they find them injured in their windshield wipers, swimming pools or fences. They then get delicious kitten milk meals

When the bats get older, they then get fed some worms.

Look right. Look Left...and cross!

Unfortunately, bats also get squashed in traffic so the university staff came to the rescue, once again.

At night, bats were going to hunt in the countryside and had to cross a busy highway so the university staff tracked the bats and built them a bridge so they could cross safely.

So, are bats and humans friends or foes? Can they live happily together?

This little rescue bat and mommy Amelie seem to think we can!

A big thank you to the staff of the museum of Natural History (Bourges).