NATURALIST
Seeing Red
North Carolina’s most beautiful bat
Story and Photographs by Todd Pusser
Some animals have a serious image problem and are in dire need of a better PR person. Take snakes, for example. Most people fear them. Many despise them. Lots hate them. Ditto for spiders. And don’t get me started on wasps.
Sharks were, until recently, feared and loathed as much as any animal. Today, due in large part to the popularity of “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel and social media campaigns by nongovernmental organizations like the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and Ocearch (each with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers), the tide is turning for these toothy predators. Many people find them fascinating and donate hard-earned cash to protect them for future generations to enjoy. Heck, a few years back on Cape Cod, a dozen vacationers enjoying a summer day at the beach rallied to help save a young great white shark stuck on the sand during an outgoing tide. They poured water over its head and gills until a boater was able to tie a rope around its tail and drag it into deeper water, where it swam away of its own accord. A video of that event went viral and racked up millions of views.
Bats, by any measure, are right up there with snakes, spiders and wasps on the unlikeable scale for much of the human population, perhaps due to their secretive nocturnal habits. Bats carry an aura of the supernatural and have long been staples in the annals of horror literature and cinema. Worldwide, they are the subject of myth and folklore. Many people fear bats as carriers of disease that will attack at any given opportunity. Granted, some individual bats can be infected with a disease such as rabies, but it is important to keep things in perspective. Far more people are bitten by rabid dogs in a given year than by rabid bats. And consider this: Beavers can carry rabies as well. Yet most people don’t fear beavers.
Bats are among our most fascinating and beneficial animals. All 17 species of bat that have been recorded in North Carolina are avid consumers of insects. Studies have shown that they eat millions of tons of insects each and every night, many of them agricultural pests. Without bats flying about the landscape, farmers would need to spend millions more dollars on pesticides.
One North Carolina bat in particular has recently captured my imagination. It all started last summer when I was sitting out in a patch of ironweed growing in the heart of the Sandhills Gameland trying to photograph sphinx moths at dusk. The moths would appear like clockwork just as the sun dipped down over the pines, hovering over the vibrant purple flowers of the ironweed like nocturnal hummingbirds.
Around the same time, several eastern red bats could be seen flying high over the ironweed patch, their velvety wings silhouetted against the golden-hued sky. With 4-inch-long bodies and wing spans just shy of a foot, the bats were not much larger than the moths. Their swooping flights over the tree canopy as they chased insects, including the sphinx moths, was mesmerizing.
As the planet’s only true flying mammals, bats are evolutionary marvels. With nearly 1,400 species recognized by scientists, bats are found across the globe, occupying all the continents except Antarctica.
True to their name, red bats are indeed gingers. With bright reddish orange fur coats, especially prevalent in males, red bats are strikingly beautiful.
Unlike most of our other native bat species, red bats tend to lead solitary lives and are not particularly social. I can relate. This quirk of their personality has saved them from a deadly fungal infection that has drastically reduced populations of their more communal cousins. The infection, known as white-nosed syndrome, has wiped out millions of bats across North America and is widely considered to be among the worst wildlife diseases in modern times.
If you step outside in the Sandhills on most summer evenings and see a bat flying overhead, chances are good it is an eastern red bat. They even overwinter here, hibernating in leaf litter on the forest floor. In fact, on warm winter days, it is not uncommon to see them flying about in the middle of the day searching for a snack. Not that long ago, while walking across the campus of Sandhills Community College on a sunny December afternoon, I saw a red bat casually swooping about the parking lot by the library hunting the few diurnal insects active at that time of year.
During hot summer months, red bats roost in trees. Hanging upside down among leaves and pine cones, their colorful fur coats allow them to blend in seamlessly with their surroundings. Unlike our other native bat species, which give birth to a single pup, eastern red bats can give birth to as many as four pups, though two is much more frequent. They make excellent moms.
Now that red bats are on my radar, I intend to spend many sunsets in the coming year gazing towards the heavens with hopes of spying these aerial acrobats. Before you judge me as strange, just take a look at their puppy-dog faces. Red bats are ridiculously cute.