Vespertilionidae

I realize I’m falling behind badly on things I wanted to write...like the “Bat Tales” series of stories about camp. Having access to public libraries once again is going to my head. I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in two sittings (wasn’t inclined to pay the $2 rental fee, but I must say it’s a good idea for preventing patrons from hogging popular new material). I had a strong suspicion as to the Prince’s identity...which turned out to be quite wrong. Reading it tends to give you a feeling like Rowling is plagiarzing her own fanfiction – the character development in Cassandra Claire’s Draco trilogy not only is better than in the last couple of books, but it anticipates what Rowling does with the ‘real’ characters in book six. However, the book’s ending is both emotionally powerful and significant to the HP story arc (which I didn’t think OOTP was). Too bad it took so many pages of filler to get there.

Anyway, other types of magic aside, I found something about bats in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of all the funny places. This is the Rolfe Humphries translation.

Book Four

And suddenly the building seemed to tremble,
The oily lamps to flare, the hearth to glow
With ruddy fire, and ghostly beasts were howling.
The sisters, hiding in the smoky rooms,
Fled from the fire and light and sought the shadows,
And over their frail limbs a film, a membrane,
Began to spread, and their arms were little wings.
They did not know, in the darkness, in what fashion
The changed had come upon the; they were lifted
On no great mass of plumage, only on wings
So frail you could see through them. They tried to speak,
But the sounds they made were as tiny as their bodies,
A squeak of protest. And still they flock to houses,
Not woods; they hate the light, and flit in darkness,
And science calls them Vespertiliones,
The bats, the evening-flutterers.

Especially tickled by the “and science calls them” bit. Actually, my favourite insect bat on the trip was the Miniopterus schreibersei. It’s a little thing with a high forehead and upturned smiley lips, and looks like a baby seal when crawling on the floor. We sometimes let bats loose in our tents in order to draw them in action – well, Jodi and Laura did. I only did it once. Every time I hung it on the side of the tent, it would flutter a couple of rounds, crash into the ground, and crawl in a corner to sulk because the nasty human was pointing a lamp at it. Then there was that time with the bags which they *thought* had only one Megaderma apiece...