Dover the Bat Tracker

We were watching a fairly inscrutable mystery on the tellie last night when Dover went on maximum alert. A graceful blackness fluttered and dipped from one end of the room to another. A bat in the house! Yikes! Ever the optimists, we opened the back door and continued to try to figure out what was going on in the mystery. The problem was that all the guys in the show looked alike - all slightly smarmy and cetainly hinting that each could eventually be tagged as the malfeasant. 


At one point we figured that the bat had made its way out into the darkness, but a sudden lurch by Dover and we saw we were wrong. We stayed calm, and by the end of the show we were quite certain we were bat-free. None the wiser about the plot but satisfied because the detectives had obviously gotten their - woman, we went upstairs and prepared for bed. So did, apparently, the bat; Dover kept us informed about where it was and when it was on the move. By the bookcase. Down the hall. In the bathroom. Back by the bookcase. We opened windows and shut doors, but every time we peeked, it was still somewhere out in the hall, and Dover, who was keeping me company in my room but eager to join in on the peeking, continued to be keen to do whatever dogs dream about doing with bats. 


When at rest, the bat was quite beautiful - it was a dark, velvety, matte black. It was, however, understandably alarmed, and it finally hid itself behind some books. Tom peeled off the books, and there it lay. I suggested he get a towel, gather it up, and take it outside, which he did. Now we are all wide awake, except Dover, who is out cold in font of a fan, and I hope the bat is happily devouring the mosquitoes and their ilk outside in the 98% humidity. We have passed into the next day.


When one of my sons was young, he became quite a fan of bats. He drew them, he painted a "Save the Bat" shirt, and he sewed a stuffed bat to sleep with. This morning, while bringing order to piles of my own drawings, I came upon some archival artwork -  bat pictures! "Bats are nice," one proclaimed. The bat above is definitely nice in that it has caught and will soon devour a poisonous spider that had been lurking in the cracks, waiting for a tasty meal to pass by.

[If you have trouble seeing what is going on

 in the bat den,click on the picture for a larger image.]