Do Bats Drink Blood?: Fascinating Answers to Questions about Bats

Seven: Bats and People

SEVEN Bats and People Question 1: Why are people afraid of bats? Answer: There is no reason to be afraid of bats. However, a quick glimpse of a bat darting out from a tree at twilight could possibly startle a person—it is a natural response, especially to an animal that is rarely seen clearly. If we saw a cat under similar circumstances, we might also be startled momentarily, but because cats are familiar and we know what to expect from them, most people would not be frightened. Bats are relatively unfamiliar, and they are thought of by many people as strange or even menacing creatures. The image of the bat’s dark wings draped around its body when it is at rest led to a common belief that witches transformed themselves into bats, so bats were sometimes nailed to barns to repel witches. In French, the word for bat is chauve-souris, literally, “bald mouse,” an association with an animal that many people are not pleased to see nearby. In fact, the shy and reclusive bat is more closely related to people than it is to rodents. You’ve heard the expression “like a bat out of hell”? Caves have always been seen as mysterious links to the bowels of the earth, and the image of a mass of bats streaking out of the mouth of a cave into the darkness, forming long ribbons that snake across the night sky, is quite a unique sight and, understandably, can inspire fantasy. It can take an hour or more for the bats to fly out of a cave if it is a very large colony. People gather nightly near 94 DO BATS DRINK BLOOD? bridges or caves where large numbers of bats roost, mesmerized as they watch the strange spectacle of bats emerging at dusk. Bats commonly roost in places considered mysterious or even haunted, such as tombs, old abandoned mines, vacant buildings , and church steeples. You’ve heard of “bats in the belfry” or “going batty,” equating bats somehow with insanity? Some cultures take this a step further into the realm of the supernatural and refer to bats as creatures created by the devil, representing danger and death. In the early 1600s, William Shakespeare used bat’s fur, along with parts of other animals that in his day symbolized evil, as part of the witches brew in Macbeth: Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,— For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. (Macbeth, IV, 1, 14–15) Bats have also been described as human souls that leave the body at night and return in the morning, or as the transformed bodies or souls of dead people who are not at peace, prowling the night and, in some cases, sucking the blood of human victims . Hollywood has certainly contributed to this frightening image of bats with a slew of films and horror stories that have exploited the association of these gentle and shy creatures of the night with danger and death. Gary McCracken (University of Tennessee at Knoxville) has traced the association of bats with vampires to stories that were reported in Europe in the sixteenth century by explorers, one of whom described his toes being bitten by bats when he was asleep in the area that is now Costa Rica. He was probably bitten by a vampire bat, found in the New World tropics, which was totally strange and unheard of in Europe. Bram Stoker gets credit for connecting the foreign image of vampire bats with the eastern European vampire stories in his 1897 novel, Dracula. In reality, there are only three species Folklore: A Selection of Bat Legends Gary McCracken of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has collected all sorts of folkloric information about bats. The legends and folktales that he and others have gathered from different cultures provide interesting insights into the way people think about bats and how they try to make sense of animal behavior that seems unusual or abnormal to them. For example, since many creatures are active during the day and sleep at night, the idea that bats are creatures of the night holds a certain mystery that begs to be explained. The ancient Hebrew storyteller Aesop tells a tale that focuses on...