A bat is a paradox par excellence! Nature seems to have started to make a little bear or fox, and suddenly forgot how and changed it into a winged freak, with tail, claws, fur, sharp teeth, small ears that stand up, and tiny, half-buried eyes. Its queer angular-edged wings look like an umbrella, with the cloth stretched over steel ribs; but in the case of the bat, this framework is made of delicate bones which are covered with a thin skin. The skin contains numerous little sense organs dotted over its surface, which give the bat his strange power.
Bats look more like mice than they do like birds, and they are sometimes called flittermice. But they are mammals, and the young are fed with milk by the mother, just as a cow feeds her calf. There is no danger that a bat will ever fly against you in the dark; for they can avoid all mishap even when their eyes are put out. They have special sense organs that tell them when they are nearing an object, and can fly at headlong speed with the accuracy of a rifle bullet directly into a small opening. This power is all due to the mysterious sense located in their wings and ears, which causes even man to consider his senses weak in comparison.
Bats are sociable creatures and huddle together and sleep in vast numbers during the day, but when night comes on they come forth for their nocturnal travels and sport by the millions. I have seen them leaving caves just at dusk in such numbers as to look like one immense volume of smoke, twenty to thirty feet wide, and lasting for more than five minutes. Mrs. Bat often takes her babies with her on these nightly travels. I found one with two young clinging to her breast. How they must enjoy these lovely trips!
There are many kinds and varieties of bats, ranging in size from the flying foxes of the tropical world, with wings five feet in length, to the wood bat of North America, which is not over six inches long. These interesting friends of man are his greatest scavengers of the air. They are doing much to check the mosquitoes throughout the regions of the world, and in more civilized communities man makes shelters for them, that they may eradicate mosquitoes.
XIII
ANIMAL SCAVENGERS AND CRIMINALS
"A warning from these pages take,
And know this truth sublime—
Each creature is a criminal
When he commits a crime."
No more remarkable creatures exist in the animal world than those that play the rôle of Nature's scavengers and criminals. They are as numerous and varied in their methods of working as they are interesting. The only things they have in common are their profession and their appetites. As individuals they are ugly, unattractive and apparently void of personality and charm. Nevertheless, they have an important part to play in the scheme of things.
One of the most noted of these scavengers is the jackal—the Bohemian of the desert—whose territory extends from the Gulf of Persia to the Strait of Gibraltar. He is equally at home in Arabia, Persia, Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, and the entire North Coast of Africa, and no country from Barbary to the Cape of Good Hope is ever out of reach of his ghostly and uncouth howls. He travels only by night, and very rapidly.