The sound of bats in the cornfields at night

2 miracles, with thanks to bees

The world is full of witchy miracles, and as we draw into autumn (finally), I want to talk to you today about bats. There’s nothing more miraculous and occult than a bat, right?

I would never have been interested in bats or bugs or any kind of anything if I hadn’t jumped face first into their world in my beekeeping suit. So, thank you, honey bees, again: my world is now over-full and glamorous with tiny marvels and signs.

Right.

So.

My first meeting with bats in Belgium was when we stopped beside a heap of nameless concrete beside the canal, resting from the cycling and the sun.

There was a sign beside the concrete.

I didn’t speak Flemish Dutch then – and my husband read it to me. This wasn’t any lump of random old concrete – but being Irish I guess I’m used to random old structures left in fields to moulder to ruin. So, I wasn’t paying very much attention.

It was a bunker! From like Saving Private Ryan or something! I couldn’t believe my luck. A real bunker. The thing is though that there are thousands of bunkers in Flanders, thanks to both World Wars in the 20th century and the preparations that were made for war.

That was the first miracle, the bunker.

And once I knew what a bunker might look like, I started seeing them everywhere.

These bunkers no longer have a military function and are often somewhat lost, adrift in a meadow, forest, or in the middle of fields. I saw one in the middle of a group of high-rise flats once. Some (probably very grateful) animals make use of them for permanent or temporary residence… including bats.

So what did the sign say? That this bunker had been adapted to new use, to help local bat populations. And a big logo: NATUURPUNT.

A solid door with an entrance opening was placed in the bunkers, other openings were bricked up and places were provided inside where bats can crawl away. Where necessary, a barrel of water provides high humidity in the bunkers. This is how we help the protected whiskered bat, the brown long-eared bat, the Natterer's bat and Daubenton's bat through the winter.

I can’t find my old photograph of it, but it basically looked like this:

I signed up for the Natuurpunt newsletter without being able to speak Dutch, which shows I probably secretly knew back then that I’d be moving permanently to Belgium. I love their manifesto:

It is not right that nature has disappeared from large parts of our lives and landscape, is it? High time to restore nature and give it a central place again. Only then can we face the biodiversity, climate and health crises. Together we go for a nature-inclusive Flanders in which people and nature flourish.

All these years later I crossed paths with Natuurpunt again, this time to go outside at night in the dark with a whole whack of other people across all age groups, two guides, and 3 heterodyne bat detectors.

It was a free event to celebrate ‘the night of the bat’, which had lots of other events happening at the same time all around Flanders. I since learned that this is an international thing.

I rocked up to it with my husband, my cousin and his girlfriend, not knowing what to expect. I certainly wasn’t expecting 60-odd people clustered around the front of a café in a charming old stone building, in a little courtyard boarded by string lights and with two musicians playing (accordion and some sort of wood instrument).

We had some beer. There was beer, of course. This is Flanders.

A brief explanation and then we were off, following our guide, the beer swishing around in the bottles in our pockets.

The guide seemed a bit nervous during his opening speech/explainer, but then his obvious passion for bats took over.

I love seeing other people light up like this!

He was wearing a t-shirt with a bat on it. A little girl was dressed up as a bat with flappy arms. We were clearly on sacred ground here.

We trekked down a narrow track in single file, under big trees beside the Small Nete river, turning corners into fields full of corn, stopping under oak trees. Trees are life, our guide reminded us a number of times: not only that, but bats need trees to move – they need obstacles for echolocation.

Big empty fields? Bats can’t fly.

Oak trees, he told us, are especially loved by bats, but then most trees are, thanks to the worlds within worlds of insects and other things that all live out their lives and dramas on the tree.

The second miracle: ‘hearing’ bats.

Bat calls are usually pitched at too high a frequency for humans to hear naturally, but thankfully they can be heard and recorded by us humans through the sublimation of a bat detector.

I’d never seen a bat detector before. This particular kind was a block-like thing that reminded me of something halfway between a Gameboy and a compact synthesiser.

You can turn the frequency up and down and see the numbers correspond on the screen. The bat calls are converted to distinctive sounds within the frequency range humans can hear: warbles, tocking, clicking, smacking sounds.

Honestly, they were exactly like the clacky clicky ones in Alien.

Can you imagine how unsettling it was to stand under trees beside a river and silent cornfields in the dark, hearing the Alien sounds? Unsettling and fabulous.

We heard a bat pretty quickly, and excitement rippled down our group. It was still twilight enough to physically see the bat carving its way in fractals through the air. After that, a few periods of silence, and I was thinking I would do anything in the world to hear the bat detector again. We did, thankfully. A lot!

As night fell, though, the bats fell out of sight. It was wonderful, and, frankly, strange, to stand there with the detector going off like a machine gun, knowing all of these journeys were happening above our heads. Even as we came out of the path and onto a more normal road with streetlights, the bat calls continued. We could see nothing.

It made me wonder:

What else could be going on, around us, all the time, without us knowing? What other worlds could we be passing through, with no knowledge of?

Have you ever had an eye-opening (ear-opening?) experience like this? Tell me about it in the comments, let’s compare notes.

Thanks for being here

See you next week! I always love to hear from you in a comment, with a ❤️, or even a restack to Substack Notes. 🐝

Jessica