BATS

Bats

Ontario Bats

    Although I did recently mention bats (oddly enough in the post about food) I will do so again because I just read this:

     “When our family took up residence in a summer cottage in Muskoka we found a very large colony of bats lodged in a spacious recess between chimney and rafters. Prodded by a stick the creatures flew out in a cloud and circled around the adjacent lamplit room. Father and I both took up a position like a batter at the home plate, vigorously swinging broomsticks and landing nets. At the end of the bout the tally was forty-four bats.” (“In the Day of the Wild Pigeon,” Chapter 9 in Part 3 of The Bruce Beckons, by W. Sherwood Fox.)

    That episode reminded my of my own bat experiences, of which there have been many. Living in an old brick house, bats were often seen as much inside as out. On one occasion I fell from a stool while attempting to scoop one off the ceiling and the result was a broken wrist. At that point, like Mr. Fox and his father, I took a more aggressive approach and my squash racket was the weapon of choice. Mr. Fox, by the way, was a well-educated classicist and president of the university where I studied and worked. He was also an mild-mannered naturalist and although his bat attack occurred in less enlightened times (c1910), I am sure he was not inclined to kill one of nature’s more useful creatures. Nor was I. But, at some point I guess, we all have the capacity to act like mugged liberals.

Georgia Bats

    Those episodes reminded me of another which makes the “very large colony” of forty bats in Muskoka, Ontario seem very small compared to the one in Tifton, Georgia. It consisted of an estimated 20,000 which were found in the abandoned home pictured above. The smells issuing from the house in the summer were apparently appalling. The solution was not obvious:

    “But what to do? Bats are protected by federal and state law, so you can’t just out and out kill them. They can be moved, but that method has its challenges when you’re talking thousands. The trick, said a local wildlife specialist, Rusty Johnson, is to seal every little crack and install tubes called excluders. The bats fly out, but they can’t fly back in. The theory is that after a couple of frustrating days, the bats will figure things out and move on. But for a few months come May, when they reproduce, you can’t use the devices at all because they might separate the moms from the babies.”

The house was demolished.

Bat Bombs

    

Those bat stories reminded me of another which is even more sensational. You may remember the reports about the C.I.A. and the attempts to assassinate Castro by using such devices as exploding cigars. Well apparently the O.S.S. was just as creative. After Pearl Harbor a plan was developed to use thousands of bats to set fires in cities in Japan.

You can learn more about it from this article in The New Yorker and the letter that follows:

“Following up on a suggestion passed along by F.D.R. himself, it [the O.S.S.] pursued a plan that involved strapping incendiary devices to bats, which would be dropped from airplanes over Japanese cities, on the theory that the bats would nest in the wooden houses in which most Japanese lived and set them on fire. Waller says that when the specially equipped bats were released from a plane in a test run, the animals dropped to earth like stones, and the project was abandoned. (Much later, the United States did fire bomb Japanese cities, in the conventional way, with devastating results.)” “Wild Thing:Did the O.S.S. help win the war against Hitler?”, Louis Menand, The New Yorker, Mr. 14, 2011.

The letter:

“Batty: A Letter in Response to Louis Menand’s Article” (March 14, 2011) in the April 11 issue

“Louis Menand describes an amusing incident during the time of Major General William (Wild Bill) Donovan’s O.S.S., in which a trial involving bats strapped to incendiary devices, meant to be dropped over Japanese cities, failed when they instead “dropped to earth like stones” (Books, March 14th). An eyewitness, Jack Couffer, gave a fuller backstory in his book “Bat Bomb,” which asserts that “the accidental incineration of Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Airfield by incendiary bats was both a high and a low in the fortunes of Project X-Ray.” It ascribes responsibility for this tragicomic incident to the vanity of the Harvard chemistry professor Louis Fieser, who invented napalm. According to Couffer, Fieser’s insistence on an aggrandizing photo shoot initiated a chain of timing errors that led to the napalm-loaded bats bursting into flame as they flew into the air field’s control tower and barracks.”

Anthony G. Oettinger

Research Professor of Applied Mathematics and Information Resources Policy

Harvard University

Sources:

  For the Tifton bat house see: “No Belfry, Just a House With 20,000 or So Bats,” by Robbie Brown & Kim Severson, The New York Times, Mar. 30, 2011.

  The picture is from the Tifton Gazette, March 28, 2011.

  Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon, by Jack Couffer is published by the University of Texas Press. You can read part of it here. A copy is available locally at the London Public Library.

Post Script:

    Animals and birds have been used by humans in warfare. A scarier scenario involves the potential of birds to wage war on their own. It sounds far-fetched, but it has just been reported that birds have apparently been deliberately setting fires in order to flush out prey.

“Australian Birds Have Weaponized Fire Because What We Really Need Now is Something Else to Make Us Afraid,” Richard Warnica, The National Post,  Jan. 9, 2017.

“Raptors, including the whistling kite, are intentionally spreading grass fires in northern Australia, the paper argues. The reason: to flush out prey and feast.

The concept of fire-foraging birds is well established. Raptors on at least four continents have been observed for decades on the edge of big flames, waiting out scurrying rodents and reptiles or picking through their barbecued remains.

What’s new, at least in the academic literature, is the idea that birds might be intentionally spreading fires themselves. If true, the finding suggests that birds, like humans, have learned to use fire as a tool and as a weapon.”

The paper referred to is:

“Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Fire Hawk’ Raptors in Northern Australia,” Mark Bonta, et al, Journal of Ethnobiology, Vol. 37, No.4, 2017