Love Letter to Bats
Most bat species don’t mate for life. We should get that out of the way right now, since that seems somehow to have become the parameter by which the love of non-human animals is measured. Many bats have, however, been known to perform oral sex — or the batty equivalent — such as, for example, the short-nosed fruit bat, which buries its face in its partners’ (that’s plural because, remember, bats are sluts) nethers and goes to town until the two are so entwined in one another that they don’t even notice they’re plummeting for the ground.
When was the last time you had sex that good?
Despite all the sleeping around, bats generally only have one pup — that’s what a baby bat is called, a pup — per year. If the environmental conditions aren’t quite right for Ms. Bat and her bundle, she can suppress the pregnancy’s progression for several months, until circumstances have improved. Carrying her future legacy around, reassured but not pressured by that soft, barely pulsing heartbeat, Ms. Bat waits for spring.
Or for the end of a drought, the prime season for her favorite fruit, financial security and tenure. What she doesn’t wait for is Mr. Bat, who has certainly dropped earthward with countless others since our Ms. Bat first felt life turn inside her.[1]
She, if she is, say, a Mexican free-tailed bat, will have plenty of time to raise her pup. 93.4% of her life, in fact, since she’ll have reached sexual maturity after just two years, with another twenty-eight ahead of her, to spend improving your desperate outdoor bonding with your children (who get only a piddling 66% of your lifespan) by eating her weight in biting insects each night.
Twenty-eight years to spend soaring through mind-bendingly wide Texas skies, where her shit — her guano — is harvested for its mineral-rich properties and hauled across the country in belching, diesel-fueled tractor trailers by mammals not gifted with flight.
[1] “Ms. Bat” and “Mr. Bat” being, of course, more for our benefit than theirs, since bats would refer to one another by names indecipherable to our echolocation-dumb ears, and also have no sense of gender.
