5:27 a.m. 71 degrees, wind S 2 mph. Sky: overcrowded and three-dimensional; highlights here and there, most pastel pink; slightly more open in the south; sun buried behind a bank of clouds; oppressively muggy like dawn in the tropics. Woods: dull, dark, dank; the air stagnant. Permanent streams: on the move but in need of a transfusion of moisture, which the sky seems unwilling to donate. Wetlands: an open bowl of green; a few dragonflies on patrol. Pond: two idling painted turtles; female hooded merganser bolts over the brown surface, rises, turns west, and pitches into the wetlands. Down from eight chicks to one last week. Now, either an empty nester or a mother in mourning . . . or both. Duck lifestyle: male, just a sperm donor. We have much more in common with swans and geese, which maintain lifelong family bonds. Queen Anne's lace blooms along the road and, overhead, in black cherry, the first fall webworm tents.
DOR: third-year garter snake
AOR: a robin (what would robins do without roads?); a red left, intensely orange and red-spotted. Meant to be seen, particularly by robins, devoted catholic feeders.
Vocal momentum: red-eyed vireos and robins; sing like there's no tomorrow. Two tanagers, screened by oak leaves and in need of a voice coach. Again, and to no avail, I strain to see them. Muted chorus: pewees, phoebes, juncos, lonely crow, jays, goldfinches. The fractured song of a hermit thrush, emissary from the dim woods, brightens the morning more than the sun, which remains buried by congested clouds. A flock of more than twenty turkeys takes issue with me. Explodes in every direction, the world resonating with thunderous wing beats and halfhearted gobbles. Then, stillness.
Behind the barn door . . . two bats, both close to the slivered opening. As an undergraduate in Indiana, I spent summer nights helping a prof with a bat-banding project. Banding bats is like banding birds, except you have to be more careful when you remove a bat from a mist net. Bats are not more delicate than a bird; in fact, bats are more substantial than songbirds of equal size. You take care because bats have sharp little teeth and carry diseases, you don't want to get.
At twilight, more than a thousand little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) would leave their communal nursery in a derelict barn. Outside, the bats trolled the night sky for insects. Little browns ate little bugs; big browns big bugs. Exiting the barn, they passed through a gauntlet of mist nets. We caught thirty or forty each night and then fixed them with aluminum anklets; the world sizzled with bat energy and reeked of ammonia. Pure Hitchcock: crumbling barn; fidgety nets strung across the doorway; clouds of bats fluttering in and out of headlamp beams. Discordant, high-pitched shrieks; an electronic broadcast suitable for a nightmare.
Several years later, as a graduate student, I glued phosphorescent gelatin capsules on the stomachs of little brown bats and big browns bats. Green for littles; blue for bigs. Then, I tracked their feeding frenzies from my kayak, mid-lake on a dark night. Green looped low. Blue high. Divvying up the food supply. Like continuous fireflies without dimmers. Phosphorescent curlicues stitched the night, knots of living light. The moveable feast light lasted until, bat by bat, the chemical fire doused when the water-soluble glue gave out.
Not long ago, my two-stall horse barn hosted a dozen little brown bats. Half an hour after sunset, the bats took wing above the pasture, each the moving epicenter of a limitless and entwined oval. Some came to the porch light like fish to chum. I miss the bats the way I missed butterflies and bees that had frequented my boyhood gardens in the late 1950s, and then suddenly vanished in a haze of backyard pesticides.
It's hard to say when—or if—bats will return to the vacant airspace above my pastures. I take solace in these two barn bats, survivors of their own crippling epidemic. Survivors, yes, survivors . . . and that's what matters.