A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende

6. Anastasio’s Last Stand

My office walls in the Cox Science Building at the University of Miami are decorated with a gorgeous red mola from Panama and a variety of framed photographs and colorful posters, mostly depicting bats and habitats where I have worked.In the midst of these is a rather small piece of scuffed leather, nicely matted and set in a dark wooden frame. This piece of leather is all that remains of a briefcase that I purchased in Costa Rica in 1971.Burnished into its tan leather is a dark cattle brand—a vespertilionid bat with rounded ears and broad tail membrane.The brand was applied to my briefcase in August 1979 by Santa Rosa park guards, who had found the branding iron on Finca Murciélago, located just west of the park. Until June 1979, Finca Murci élago (Bat Farm) belonged to Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Nicaragua’s strongman president, who was driven from office on 17 July of that year. Just before Somoza was ousted,Costa Rica expropriated his ranch and turned it over to the National Park Service. Murciélago eventually was annexed to Santa Rosa. The Murciélago brand in my office serves to remind me of a time when 133 6 Anastasio’s Last Stand Cattle brand from Finca Murciélago, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. Drawing by Ted Fleming. political upheaval raged less than fifty kilometers from Santa Rosa and threatened to spill over from war-torn Nicaragua into peaceful Costa Rica. The summer of 1979 was a time when my research on bats and plants was nearly halted by larger forces affecting our activities in the park.That summer , a small army of Costa Rican soldiers practiced serious war games at Santa Rosa. Military officials were adamant that gringo scientists, namely Dan Janzen and I and our field crews, must leave the park. Only Dan’s stubbornness in the face of constant pressure from the military enabled us to continue research that year. I first became aware of the Sandinistas, Nicaragua’s anti-Somoza guerrilla army, and the impending political turmoil in Costa Rica’s northern neighbor in March 1977. On one of my days off at Santa Rosa, I read in the international edition of Time about the growing conflict between the FSLN (Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional) and Somoza’s Guardia Nacional . The article, entitled “Somoza’s Reign of Terror,” indicated that the Guardia Nacional was killing any peasants who were thought to be Sandinista sympathizers. In a footnote, Time explained that the Sandinistas were “named for Augusto Cesar Sandino, a guerrilla leader who fought against occupying U.S. Marines in the late 1920s and was executed in 1934 by the founder of Nicaragua’s ruling dynasty, Anastasio (‘Tacho’) Somoza Garcia” (Time 1977, 29). Tacho’s son “Tachito” was first elected president in 1967, twelve years after his father’s assassination. By 1977, opposition to him was widespread in Nicaragua. Those opposing Somoza hoped that newly elected U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, with his strong human rights platform, would pressure Tachito into relaxing his dictatorial grip on the lives of his countrymen. I filed this news report in the back of my mind and then forgot about it as my family and I prepared to move to England in early September 1977. We were excited about spending our first academic sabbatical at Oxford University , where I would be a visiting scientist at the Edward Grey Institute for Field Ornithology. At Oxford I temporarily left bats behind to study the communal roosting behavior of pied wagtails, lovely black and white birds about the size and shape of mockingbirds.Wagtails feed by picking tiny insects from the ground in meadows and pastures and along city sidewalks. The basic question I wanted to answer was, Do the communal roosts of pied wagtails serve as information centers about the locations of good feeding areas? The hypothesis that bird (and bat?) roosts serve as food information centers was a hot topic in behavioral ecology in 1977. It had been put forward as a general explanation for communal roosting in birds by PeterWard and Amotz Zahavi in 1973. 134 / Chapter 6 To answer this question for wagtails, I had to get up before dawn in the cold, damp British winter and drive to a Phragmites reed bed northwest of Oxford.There I recorded the number of birds leaving the roost together and the direction flown by each...