Amazing experience

When out and about on an evening walk or bike ride, it's not unusual to see a few bits of wildlife just coming out at dusk.

Tonight, we saw bats. That's not unusual round here. We see bats all the time. But this time there were loads of them. We'd stopped for a game of frisbee when they turned up. Our game soon stopped as we watched the bats. The wife and kids were a bit scared at first but I assured them that because we're not small flying insects, the bats have precisely zero interest in our existence. So we just stood and watched their aerial acrobatics. There were loads of them, and they were regularly whizzing around within inches of our heads. It was quite mesmerising. As we never got any bother from midges, I'm going to assume that the bats were snatching the midges before the midges could bug us.

After a while, we decided it was past the kids bed time, so we set off walking back, and came face to face, up close and personal, to an owl that had come out on the hunt. It was excellent.

 

We have bats in our loft.....every year.
They almost dive bomb you at dusk out in our garden as the fly so low catching the midges.

 

Random thought, but I wonder why bats are associated with scary horror fiction. Seems to me they are both harmless to humans and disinterested in us, yet every Halloween setup features bat images, and there's an uncountable number of works of horror fiction featuring them. Some might speculate that it's because they only come out at night, but then why not make the owl the focus of scary fiction, they only come out at night and unless you're a month or a midge, owls are more scary, with their spooky silent flight, massive eyes, and razor sharp talons.

Anyway, I said it was a random musing. That's how my twisted mind works

 

I wonder if the bat fear is as atavistic as the fear of snakes and spiders seen even in young apes. Bats are potentially life threatening animals, with their easily transferrable diseases (rabies) and some species killing mammals with them feeding on blood.

It's interesting to see how just the movement of a snake can cause alarm on an animal (humans included) even in areas where there are no poisonous snakes. An interesting article: Fear of Snakes, Spiders Rooted in Evolution, Study Finds

 

I watched a documentary once that tried to address why every culture has independently come up with the concept of the flying dragon. They were speculating that it comes from truly ancient mamalian instincts, from a time when our very, very ancient ancestors were small, and prey to a lot of predators. They speculate that the four legs with sharp claws represent cats and other mammal predators, the fact that it's lizard like representing the snake, and the fact that it flies representing birds of prey. Who knows.

 

Flying dragons were the only way ancients could describe all the UFO's flying about. Same with flying turtles. Turtle shell is the same shape as a UFO.