The Lady Who Hated Bats

Miss Pearl is horrified to discover what has been drinking from her hummingbird feeders.

The two things that Miss Pearl liked most in life were flowers and hummingbirds.

Luckily her garden had a lot of both.

 

Every morning, Miss Pearl would prune and water her flowers. And every morning she would refill the hummingbird feeders with the special food that hummingbirds like. Hummingbirds don’t eat seeds like other birds. They sip the nectar of flowers and so the food in the feeders was a mixture of sugar and water.

 

“My but you are hungry little guys. How can such tiny birds drink so much?” She would say as she poured the liquid in.

 

Every evening, Miss Pearl would sit in the comfortable lounge chair in her garden and watch the hummingbirds flit around the flowers.  She couldn’t think of anything more wonderful than the little birds with their brightly colored feathers and fast moving wings.

 

One evening while sitting in her comfortable lounge chair, Miss Pearl drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, it was well past sundown and her garden was dark.

 

“Oh my!” she exclaimed. “I should go inside right away!” As she stood up from her chair she noticed that there were dark shapes moving around her hummingbird feeders.

 

“Now what can that be?” she wondered and moved closer to them. As the moon came up from behind the mountains, Miss Pearl was shocked to see that the shadows were bats!

 

“Oh my!” she exclaimed again.  “Shoo! Shoo! Get away from my feeders!” she said waving her arms. “Those aren’t for you! You nasty, blind, rodents!”

 

Miss Pearl continued to wave her arms at the bats as they swooped and fluttered around her. They came close enough for her to hear the clicking-chirping sound they made. Suddenly a most unpleasant thought came into her head.

 

“What if they fly into my hair and get stuck! OH MY!”

 

Miss Pearl covered her head with her arms and ran into her house.

She watched the bats from her window and shuddered.

 

“I will have to think of a way to get rid of them. I can’t have bats around my home!” She said to herself.

 

That night as she lay in bed, she thought she had come up with a pretty good plan.

 

The next morning, Miss Pearl took some old clothes out of her attic. She got some wooden boards and some nails and she took them out to the garden.

 

“I’m going to make a scare bat,” she said to the hummingbirds that were buzzing around the hummingbird feeders. “The bats will see it and be scared away. Then all the hummingbird food will be yours.” She told them.

 

After nailing the boards together into the shape of a “T”, Miss Pearl put her old pink dress over it and a large straw hat where it’s head should be. It didn’t look very scary to her but, she decided, she wasn’t a bat and that it would have to do.

 

That evening she watched out the window to see what would happen.

 

The sun went down and for a while it seemed like maybe the scare bat was working. Miss Pearl smiled happily.

Then the moon came up and Miss Pearl saw that the bats were back. They swooped around the scare bat and to the feeders without any hesitation at all.

 

“OH MY!” Miss Pearl frowned. “This is very upsetting! Now what do I do?”

 

Miss Pearl fell asleep that night thinking about how she might get rid of those pesky bats and ended up having a nightmare.

 

In her nightmare, huge bats with sharp teeth were chasing her. They wanted to bite her neck and drink her blood.  They got tangled in her hair and shrieked in her ears. She woke up very upset and decided that she was going to take care of the bats once and for all.

 

That morning Miss Pearl got up and went to her local library.

 

“There has got to be some book in this library that can tell me how to get rid of those bats!” she said as the librarian helped her find all the books on bats that they had.

“I will sit here and read every one of these until I find out what to do.”

 

Miss Pearl sat down, opened the first book and began to read. She read and read. She read about the bats that lived around her house and about bats that live in far, far away places. She read about big bats and she read about tiny little bats no bigger than a bumblebee. She read about what bats eat and where they live and what they do.

 

And a very interesting thing happened.

 

Miss Pearl realized that bats are not at all like what she thought they were.

 

They are not rodents. Bats are in a group of mammals call Chiroptera and are not even related to mice.

 

They are not blind. Most bats can see pretty well, but when they are flying they use echolocation to keep from running into things. The little squeaks they make bounce off objects and come back to them so they don’t run into those objects in the dark. They would never get caught in her hair, like she feared, because they knew exactly where she was.

 

They are not nasty. They are in fact very nice animals that are important to the ecosystems in which they live. In some places, bats help farmers by eating the harmful insects that might destroy their crops.  Some of the bats around her home eat insects like moths and mosquitoes. Miss Pearl thought about how much she disliked being bitten by mosquitoes and thought that was a very good thing. Miss Pearl found out that the bats that drink from her hummingbird feeders were also helping to pollinate her flowers.

 

 

Miss Pearl read that there are indeed some types of bats that drink blood. That was frightening, until she read that those kinds of bats are very small and usually aren’t even around people. The blood they drink is usually from other animals and that they do this while the animal is sleeping. Why, most the time, the animal doesn’t even wake up! And the bat is so small and takes such a little bit of blood, that the animal isn’t even hurt by it.

 

Miss Pearl looked at pictures of the many different types of bats. Some she found a little frightening, and some were definitely weird looking. But a lot of them were… well.. sort of… cute. 

 

On her way home from the library, Miss Pearl thought about all the things she now knew about bats.

They still scared her, a little, but she decided that she no longer hated them.

She thought about all the flowers in her garden and how the bats helped them bloom.

She thought about all the biting bugs that would keep her from enjoying her garden if the bats weren’t there.

And she thought that maybe… maybe… she might actually like the bats.

 

“Yes.” Miss Pearl nodded to herself as she filled the hummingbird feeders that evening and hung them up for her nighttime visitors.

 

“I have decided: I do indeed like bats.”

Author's Note

It is what it is. I hope you enjoy it.