I must have my constitutional, but I’ll leave you with this video about the life and work of a great naturalist and biologist, Merlin Tuttle. Tuttle (born 1941) devoted his career to studying and saving bats. His various efforts are shown in the film, and have occurred worldwide.
Donate to his foundation, which you can do here. Bats are wonderful creatures and good for the planet.
h/t: Mark
Merlin Tuttle transformed Austin into a bat-friendly city and got the city’s residents excited about seeing bats. Bat tours are popular there thanks to him. Great guy. I went with him to Bracken cave in Texas to see twenty million bats coming out of the cave at dusk. Fantastic! There were so many that the ones on the outside of the “funnel cloud” of bats would be driven into the shrubs. Hawks were diving through the cloud to eat them. There was one albino!
He is a real hero! Batman.
I am impressed by how he converts people from bat population destroyers to bat population helpers. Great work.
Wow. What a guy. I’m sold. I’ll give him/them a piece of my government check (which I do not deserve) to his foundation. (Most is going to local charities and kiva.org)
It is worth noting that if we didn’t eat/sell/exploit bats (as part of fake Traditional Chinese “Medicine”) we might not be in this mess. Spare us from pseudoscientific b.s.
D.A., NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
How is the “white nose syndrome” epidemic going in America? I haven’t heard anything about it for several years now – which might mean good things or bad things. I think that European troglodytes have got the message about sterilising kit (and selves) before returning home, but I must admit to not having heard anything for several years.
Oh dear, got as far as Washington state and California. Not good.
The uncertainty about it’s origin seems to have cleared up in the last half-decade or so. The pathogen is widely identified but harmless in European bats, but appears to have entered NA in the vicinity of New York around the start of the millennium, and spread in a naïve population with significant population loss as a consequence. Sounds familiar.