Bats! Bats! Bats!

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Last night I saw bats for the very first time here in Finland. I've seen bats only once before, in Sydney. Fruitbats.

I can still almost feel the pungent, sweet scent of the fruitbats urine hanging heavily in the air of autumn Sydney. There's nothing quite like it.

These finnish bats were a whole new and different experience altogether. As fruitbats glide through the air of the night, flopping their wings lazily under the streetlights in the city I had never experienced before and seen only glimpses of on the silverscreen of the cinema; as the whole experience of being there, all jetlagged and jittery felt dreamlike and alien as if warped into another dimension and not only into a different culture, the fruitbats were jut another thing to gawk at. Just another thing amidst the fall fashion of the Australian ladies, amidst the frigging cicadas chirping away in darkness, amidst the huge tree-spiders living in colonies built of webs that had the thickness and the strength of a good fishing line. Just another thing boggling my jet-lagged and wedding-dazed mind. But these finnish bats? A whole different breed. Small. First I thought they were swallows. They had almost the same velocity, but their flight patterns were unlike anything I'd ever seen. Perhaps some bird that flies in the nighttime? No. Bats. Fast. Something I'd never experienced before in my life. Little flying beasts that feed on insects. Bats.

I watched them in awe. They were beautiful and the experience overwhelming. And when I finally went inside and to sleep I almost thought I heard their screeching and clicking, through the window of my bedroom, small noises, sudden and violent whispers of their hunting in the far reaches of my hearing under the humming of my blood. It must have been my imagination though. Usually you don't hear the bats hunting, but you might see them, like I did, speeding silouettes against the still blue of the night sky of the northern summer.

 

Are bats that uncommon in Finland? They're cute little things though, guess I wouldn't consider it awe inspiring, just beautiful. Used to see them a LOT in the areas I've lived in. Same as foxes, badgers, rabbits and deer though.

 

Maybe they're a little less common around these latitudes because of the short summer and the long winter. A little less insect around to feed upon.

For some reason I've just never seen them around. Hence the awe. They've been around, especially where I used to spend my summers as a kid, but I've just never seen them. Until now. Yes, beautiful.

There's a lot of wild things I've never laid my eyes upon. Never seen a badger in the wild or at all. Never seen a fox as I recall, but once a suicidal deer tried to run to get hit by the car I was travelling in. As it saw us coming by the road, it speeded up, made haste to be right on the spot so we could crash it if we'd not slow down. We did and the deer ran across the road right before the hood of the car.

 

Bats are great. Only seen one once in my area, and it's a shame. Went out to see friends in the country, and when we left we saw a half-dozen of them, flapping round and being generally awesome.