Bats
It should be fairly clear from the image at the top of this page that I’m very fond of bats, both megachiroptera (fruit bats) and microchiroptera (insectivorous bats). Not only are they flying mammals, which is a great start, but the micro bats also eat biting insects which would otherwise eat me, which endears them to me hugely. If all that wasn’t enough, they are also furry, squeaky and cute. I’m labouring these points, because you’d probably otherwise get the impression from the following paragraphs that I hate bats.
During our stay in the Pantanal, we had to move rooms because of a booking confusion. The hotel rooms were wooden, two-story cabins, and we moved from a ground floor1 room to a top floor one, which had an open space above it and to each side, under the eaves. It only took a few minutes of listening to a lot of squeaking, scrabbling and batty scrambling around2. And then there was the smell. No mammalian urine (as far as I know—-I haven’t done a thorough survey) smells exactly fragrant, but bat pee is particularly musky and lingering, and there was a very distinct whiff of it, both inside and outside our room. When you’re getting up at 5am in the dark, an all-pervading atmosphere of bat pee doesn’t improve the experience.
