Bat Garland
I love bats. In our urban home in Astoria, we installed a bat house right outside my writer’s window. Bats need homes, too, and these structures align perfectly with my homekeeper’s need to shelter the misunderstood. In Astoria as now, we lived near a park where bats fed during the night, helping maintain nature’s balance with pest control. It gave me the warm fuzzies – or maybe the warm shriekies - to know that during the day, bats slumbered safely in their shelter.
Sheltering the misunderstood is just one of the lessons bats teach. Because they live by night, emerging from deep caves, bats carry the secrets of darkness. As themselves, bats are gentle, curious, group oriented, and hungry for bugs. As spiritual beings, bats inhabit profound connections with the dark rhythms of nature, from change through evolution to, in some traditions, the secrets of the sacred cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
While a secular festival, Halloween grows from harvest festivals from ancient Samhain to more recent Harvest Home. Thus Halloween’s connections to the natural world, from the witches who celebrate sacred seasonal rites to black cats, pumpkins, wolves, spiders, owls, and, of course, bats. Vampire bats are particularly attuned to Halloween’s deep autumn energy, from the blood that gives life even as fangs drain it to sleeping upside down in the dark.
If you discount humans on airplanes, bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. Their wings are actually elongated digits just like the phalanges of your skeleton, covered with a thin membrane called a patagium that makes them agile and swift when in flight. Bats are social, with clusters of bats known as a colony, and populous, with over 1,400 different species found worldwide. They are insectivores though some are herbivores, but out of those 1,400 only three are sanguivores: common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata), and white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi).*
Bats’ trademark screech is echolocation, using their distinctive voices and sharp hearing to determine where they are. The cry of a colony of bats is the hallmark of many a horror trope, from vampire stories to goth music. Indeed, no animal outside of the black cat is as universal an ambassador of Halloween as bats are. Perhaps this is because bats, as emissaries from caves of deep mystery, touch something primeval in us. From the life experiences we all go through to the passage through the veil, we fly from, and return to, the seasons of the passages of life. We navigate through echoes and shadows, seeking our route through the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Bats guide us through the dark.
To celebrate bats’ contribution to our lives, and just for some spooky fun, here is a simple Halloween project: a garland of slumbering bats. As you string your bats up for bedtime, consider not just honoring bats as the Halloween ambassadors they are, but thanking them with a contribution to bat conservation and well-being.
Sheltering the misunderstood is just one of the lessons bats teach. Because they live by night, emerging from deep caves, bats carry the secrets of darkness. As themselves, bats are gentle, curious, group oriented, and hungry for bugs. As spiritual beings, bats inhabit profound connections with the dark rhythms of nature, from change through evolution to, in some traditions, the secrets of the sacred cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
While a secular festival, Halloween grows from harvest festivals from ancient Samhain to more recent Harvest Home. Thus Halloween’s connections to the natural world, from the witches who celebrate sacred seasonal rites to black cats, pumpkins, wolves, spiders, owls, and, of course, bats. Vampire bats are particularly attuned to Halloween’s deep autumn energy, from the blood that gives life even as fangs drain it to sleeping upside down in the dark.
If you discount humans on airplanes, bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. Their wings are actually elongated digits just like the phalanges of your skeleton, covered with a thin membrane called a patagium that makes them agile and swift when in flight. Bats are social, with clusters of bats known as a colony, and populous, with over 1,400 different species found worldwide. They are insectivores though some are herbivores, but out of those 1,400 only three are sanguivores: common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata), and white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi).*
Bats’ trademark screech is echolocation, using their distinctive voices and sharp hearing to determine where they are. The cry of a colony of bats is the hallmark of many a horror trope, from vampire stories to goth music. Indeed, no animal outside of the black cat is as universal an ambassador of Halloween as bats are. Perhaps this is because bats, as emissaries from caves of deep mystery, touch something primeval in us. From the life experiences we all go through to the passage through the veil, we fly from, and return to, the seasons of the passages of life. We navigate through echoes and shadows, seeking our route through the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Bats guide us through the dark.
To celebrate bats’ contribution to our lives, and just for some spooky fun, here is a simple Halloween project: a garland of slumbering bats. As you string your bats up for bedtime, consider not just honoring bats as the Halloween ambassadors they are, but thanking them with a contribution to bat conservation and well-being.
Click here for the project.
*Schutt, Bill. Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures. New York: Harmony Books, 2008.
Read further
*Schutt, Bill. Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures. New York: Harmony Books, 2008.
Read further
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